


accomplice in catastrophe

by Tepriyalles



Category: The Flight Attendant (TV)
Genre: F/F, Slow Burn
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-12-12
Updated: 2021-02-05
Packaged: 2021-03-10 19:15:43
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 10
Words: 37,133
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28022280
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Tepriyalles/pseuds/Tepriyalles
Summary: Whatever weird little piece of Bangkok-with-a-Scottish-twist dislodged from that hell-in-a-hotel-room and stalked her home, Miranda isterrifyingandexcitingand totally new, and there aren’t that many things that are totally new when you’ve been to as many places as Cassie has. And she’s jittery, and there goes the second shot and she’sstilljittery, but something is telling her maybe this wasn’t need-a-drink need-to-get-going scared-of-dying jitters in the first place.Maybe this is excitement.And maybe this is the disasterly-duo-on-the-run-in-Montreal spin-off fic no one was going to ask for.
Relationships: Miranda Croft/Cassie Bowden
Comments: 170
Kudos: 169





	1. Chapter 1

Cassie is not going to get on a plane to Montreal with Miranda. That’s a pretty simple thing to not do. Not getting on a plane is by definition simpler than getting on one. Getting on a plane when you aren’t there to pour the drinks is a complete nightmare. Getting on a plane as a passenger means no shortcuts through security. It means shoes off, phone in the little gray bin, the TSA guy with the excessively groomed mustache giving you a real squinty look when Stacey Q starts playing from inside the x-ray box and Miranda giving you a full on eyeroll when you scramble to pick it up the minute it pops from the belt to the rollers, reaching all the way around the grandpa grabbing his jacket and still saying “Excuse me, excuse me,” when you pick up, only to _hear_ the click on the other end that means you're one ring too late. 

It means Miranda stealing your phone right out of your hand and pocketing it on the far side of her body and taking you by the elbow so hard you can’t even find the wiggle room to grab for it back, just wince and say “Ow, ow, _ow,_ ” as she drags you to the seating area. 

Then it means sitting. For _hours_ . Because as a passenger, you show up and you sit around because you don’t trust them to wait even if you’re _on time_ and no one has on time down to an art like Cassie does, and that’s because waiting? Waiting is the worst. 

And waiting to get on a plane to Montreal with Miranda would be terrible, right. Right? Because Miranda is a dead silent, un-fidgety waiter that sits right next to you like a frowny, cross-armed marble statue except for the times her mouth opens to say “No,” when you ask “Can I _please_ have my phone back?” 

Fuck. Why the _fuck_ did Cassie agree to get on a plane to Montreal with Miranda. 

She said no! She said it right to Alex’s face, in the hotel room in her brain. She said it. Out loud. To a person. In her subconscious. Which was still a person, right? She _said_ she was done running. 

Then Miranda came in and said “What the fuck was that?” and somewhere between Cassie apologizing and Cassie trying to figure out how to say it out loud outside of her head, Miranda sat down in one of the miniature blue plastic chairs at the Sunday school table and said “Ten minutes ago you were running down that hallway like a crazy person. If you don’t stop running off on me when I am trying to get you not killed, then you die.” and all of a sudden it was a running catch-22 and if running away _from_ Miranda was the only alternative to running away _with_ Miranda, well, Miranda was there, in front of her, looking down at her — somehow, despite the chair that was only six inches off the ground — with a kind of exasperated expectation that was _really hard_ to say no to, and Miranda _was_ saying this type of running had survival odds above zero, and she hadn’t actually felt like her head was this far above water since Bangkok so as long as “I’m not going back in that… thing. Room. Place. Miranda,” got an answer she could live with...

Maybe there was still an okay kind of running if it meant living to _not_ run... some other day. 

“Fine, you sulk here, I’ll get what we need and be right back.” 

And Cassie did. Definitely did. Definitely sulked. And Miranda was. Up out of the kiddie chair and back fifteen minutes later with an envelope she wouldn’t let Cassie look in, and now Cassie has a knee-bouncing two hour wait with no phone to show for it, and the man across from her is wiping his glasses on the waistband of whatever he has on _under_ his pants, and statue-Miranda is sitting on the hem of Cassie’s coat and every time she moves enough that it even tugs so much as an inch out from under her, she gets that absolutely terrifying glare that makes Cassie think of Murder-On-a-Train-Miranda, and Murder-With-a-Gun-Miranda, and so she hasn’t even been able to get a drink or five to nurse her through the hell of it all because she is never going to get out of her seat with Miranda glaring at her like that, so why the _actual fuck_ is she going to Montreal with her?

“Attention passengers on Air Canada flight 2411 to Montreal — we will begin boarding in five minutes. At this time, we would like to invite any Star Alliance Gold passengers to make your way to boarding lane one, while any passengers requiring special assistance and those with small children can start lining up in lane two. Please have your boarding pass in hand. Thank you for choosing Air Canada for your travel experience today!” 

“Thank _god_ ,” Cassie groans, fishing around for her boarding pass before she remembers she hasn’t seen it — Miranda kept them both firmly in hand other than the three seconds they were pressed to the scanning glass at the TSA podium. Almost like she doesn’t trust her or something. 

“Would you stop fidgeting.” 

“Maybe if you give me my boarding pass and let go of the mile of my coat you’re sitting on so we can get ready to _go_ already, I will.” 

“Why, are you a small child?” 

“Ha, ha.” Cassie puts a lot of deadpan in both syllables, but there’s a little shake on the end of it. She needs a drink. Badly. 

“Relax.” 

Miranda drops a floppy piece of paper in her lap. Cassie flips it disclaimer-side-down and feels her eyebrows shoot up when she realizes it says “First Class.” 

“Just because we’re running doesn’t mean we have to travel like rats. Just let the extra special golden mooses through and _then_ you can get up and for fucks sake, shake off those jitters before we get on. You look like you’re on something.” 

“Well you— you look like a—- a— scary, murdery lady,” she finally hisses under her breath, not coming up with anything better in the two point five seconds it takes for Miranda to skewer her with her scary, murdery lady eyes. 

“Thank you,” she says flatly, then stands up. 

* * *

They’re side by side. The armrests between them could take up the whole aisle and half a seat in coach. Takeoff is smooth. Totally uneventful. The voice talking them through the _is-this-your-first-time-buckling-a-seatbelt?_ training is male, and Cassie thinks about Shane even though they don’t sound anything alike. God, was that going to have been the last time she talked to Shane? Sheesh. That might be the Thing (trademark) out of all of this that makes her a terrible person. 

No, no. That was Davey. Lying to Davey in a church was go-to-hell level bad person shit, if you believe in that kind of thing. 

Oh, _god_ , nope, not even that. Because then there was Annie— Definitely Annie was the Thing. Lying to your best friend who you just dragged out of her loverboy’s hospital room which you had gotten said loverboy into in the first place was— 

Then she sees the buckle-your-seatbelt voice, and it helps shake the weird mix of workplace deja vu and existential running away crisis spiral she’s been having ever since she walked past the interphone. For one, he’s more like Megan’s age than Shane's or anyone else on her usual crew. For two, he’s white, and for three, he’s _very_ white. Like, cookie-cutter. Super bland — brown hair, brown eyes, uneventful, reasonably symmetrical face — except for a man bun so aggressively overstyled in that just-a-few-hairs-out-of-place-but-I-absolutely-put-them-there way only single, heterosexual men ever think is a good look. Someone needs to teach them that it's fine to just go all in. Embrace the pretty, or embrace the sheer human mess of it all - stop doing everything so… halfway. Shane could teach this guy a thing or five, especially about how not to take ten _years_ getting back to her with that promise he’ll be back soon with her drinks she can hear him giving the Star Moose Gold people in the first two rows. The worst news is, she can smell whatever Super Duper Strong Man branded male cologne or soap or _something_ he took an entire bath in from three seats up, and it's _not_ pretty. It’s almost bad enough she doesn’t want to order a drink from him — like, if that smell sticks to the glass, and she has to drink vodka through a cloud of Carbon Pine Muscle Fresh— 

Key word being _almost_. She is one hundred percent having that drink.

Miranda reaches down to tuck the handle of her black handbag further under the seat in front of her. Cassie, watching the approach of her soon-to-be-drink-order-taker with eagle eyes and a scrunched up nose, watches the man stare straight down the front of Miranda’s shirt. 

She blinks. Seriously? 

He’s _still_ doing it. I mean, sure, Miranda does have like, two buttons open but that is _not_ an invitation to be that fucking obvious in the middle of a fucking airplane. 

Cassie clears her throat. Man-bun kind of glances her way, but then Miranda is sitting up again, and he’s _right_ up in her personal space with a “Can I get you anything from our food or beverage selection today?” in a voice two steps lower and slower than he just used with the old businessman on the other side of the aisle. 

Cassie, separated from her drink by this half-assed middle-aged-man-flirting because the murder lady just _had_ to take the aisle seat, finds herself going from travel-stressed to travel-pissed in about half a second. 

“No, thank you.” Miranda answers evenly. 

“Are you sure? We have an excellent selection of—” 

Cassie leans around Miranda, hoping to grab his attention by sheer force of glare, only to see he’s _still_ not looking at Miranda’s face. Ok, this is beyond gross now. Miranda looks totally oblivious — she barely even looked his way when he got here which, honestly, Cassie could have done without the whole seeing thing herself.

“Quite sure,” Miranda cuts him off. 

“Well, if you change your mind, just ask for Ben — I’ll be at your beck and call for the duration of the flight.” 

“Um, excuse me? Yes hi, me, the other chair. She already said no, thanks for noticing, but I’d like a vodka, neat. Or actually, make that two, for my buddy here’s two eyes you never once looked at because you were staring down her shirt.” 

The man has the good form to go a splotchy red around the edges at being called out, then completely ignore the comment, straighten up, and casually agree, “Coming right up, ma’am.” He backs away _fast._

“Did he just ma’am, me? Did I look like I waned to get ma’am-ed just then?” 

“Did you really just shame that poor gentleman for flirting with a customer?” 

_“Excuse me?”_

“Remind me again how you and Alex met?” 

“Uh, listen, you. Alex and I— We— That was totally different. _He_ flirted with _me._ ” 

“Oh, that makes it better, does it? Flirting with the lady who's getting paid to be nice to him?” 

“What. Stop it. Did you _want_ to flirt with Mr. Aftershave?” 

Miranda’s lips twist in a thin little smile. “Maybe I did.” 

“Oh, please.” Then, Cassie stops. Frowns at herself a little. Just because _she_ thought he smelled like he sweated out the entire forbidden men’s deodorant aisle of Bath and Body Works doesn’t mean Miranda had been as repulsed as she was. “Did you?” 

Miranda turns an absolutely insulted stare her way. 

“Oh thank god,” Cassie groans. “I don’t know how I would have made scary murder lady persona match up with the mental image of musk-bun sneaking you off to the main cabin lav.” 

“Hello, steward? Yes. I’m going to need a drink that will wipe the sentence my traveling companion just said to me out of my brain.” 

Miranda’s voice is utterly soft, low — so serious she might have been speaking to an attendant at her elbow, but the aisle is empty since beck-and-call-Ben left, and Cassie takes three seconds to stare at her in shock, then bursts out laughing. 

It’s way too loud, and high, and kind of wheezy, and then she can’t stop and has to shove her face in her hands and the lot of it into the extra cushy seat-back in front of her before she chokes on it, but it feels _good_ to laugh. Not a nervous, _you-think-I’m-crazy-ha-ha_ laugh, or a panicked, _I-think-I’m-crazy-haAA-ha_ laugh, but a weird, strangled, the-murder-lady-next-to-me-is-kind-of-funny laugh that she feels in that spot between her ribs that pretty much only ever feels warm when she’s five shots in and probably shouldn’t be standing up yet but is totally ready to dance. 

And Miranda isn’t looking at her like she’s crazy. Well, a little bit, that exasperation never really seems to go away, but maybe that’s just the eyebrows. Even better, she actually gets that little smile back before she turns to make room for musk-bun to deposit Cassie’s glasses on the side-tray stretch of the big, first-class armrests and pour out the two mini-bottles without a word, and Cassie has the strangest realization that, despite the series of bad, then weird, then terrifying introductions they’ve had, she kind of really likes Miranda. Even when she didn’t remember her and was mostly sure she’d never find her and if she did she _might_ wind up dead for it, there’d been a hazy memory that drinks with Miranda had been… a good time. When had she _ever_ had a fancy first date interrupted by a weird woman and walked away like, yeah? I liked her! I’d spend time with her again. And then after _all the shit she’d been through_ ? She should have been… you know, turning her in or something, the absolute god for fucking minute she was of sight. This woman had bailed her out at _gunpoint_ for fucks sake! She killed someone _yesterday._ Yesterday! 

Cassie takes the first shot. 

Yup, still here. Still on a plane. To Montreal. With Miranda. Because instead of acting like a normal person she just… went with it. Said hi, gun lady. Maybe we can help each other out. 

Miranda is like… Not real. Not the way anyone she knows in the city is. Whatever weird little piece of Bangkok-with-a-Scottish-twist dislodged from that hell-in-a-hotel-room and stalked her home, Miranda is _terrifying_ and _exciting_ and totally new, and there aren’t that many things that are totally new when you’ve been to as many places as Cassie has. And she’s jittery, and there goes the second shot and she’s _still_ jittery, but something is telling her maybe this wasn’t need-a-drink need-to-get-going scared-of-dying jitters in the first place. 

Maybe this is excitement. 

Maybe she’s actually excited to see what happens next. 


	2. Chapter 2

New York to Montreal is a shorter flight than the time they spent sitting at the gate, and Cassie milks that hour-thirty drinks-included first class ticket for all it’s worth. 

Somewhere around drink six, she starts taking perverse pleasure in watching Ben squirm every time she  _ yoo-hoo _ ’s him back over. Not even Miranda’s under-breath mutter of “I think I’m starting to understand that Sunday-school freakout” can puncture the shiny, whirly bubble she’s in by the time they land. 

“I’ve never worked Air Canada you know,” she says as she skips the last step off the ramp and lets her boots slide a few inches on the epoxy-coated flooring. “We drove to Toronto once when I was a kid. It took  _ allllll  _ day. Ooh—” She sidles up to a seemingly unmanned kiosk in the middle of the walkway between gates and tugs a pair of big, blue-lensed sunglasses off a carousel. “Do I need a  _ disguise _ , now?” 

“Put those down.” Miranda snatches the glasses off her nose and drops them on the counter, then takes her by the elbow again, quickly pulling her to the middlemost point of the walkway where she’s not in easy reach of the bars on the right or the stands on the left. “For fucks sake, please just — walk in a straight line. No grabbing. No sliding. And sunglasses are  _ not _ a disguise.” 

Cassie giggles and tucks her hands more comfortably around Miranda’s arm, mostly to get her to stop squeezing her elbow like a bony orange in an even bonier juice press, but also because she will  _ probably _ do a better job of the straight-line-walking if she has someone to lean on. “Party pooper.” 

Miranda doesn’t even bother to sigh at her. 

When they get to the big bank of windows at the turn, Cassie slows down, dragging Miranda with her. “Not much of a view here, is there.” 

“We’re in an airport terminal.” 

“I know _ that _ . Plenty of airports give you something nice to look at. It’s like they didn’t even try. You can’t see the city, you can barely even see the planes.” 

“Is that really what you want to do right now? See some more planes?” 

Cassie pouts up at her. “I want to see Mon-tre-al.” She makes her eyes as big as they get, and Miranda’s lips twitch. 

“Then stop dawdling. There’ll be a better view once we are  _ outside  _ of the airport, where I would also like to be.”

Cassie makes a show of leaning back against the handrail. “You know, you aren’t even the first person who asked me to run away with them today. You really should be nicer to me. Just because you  _ think _ you won the run-away-with-Cassie competition doesn’t mean I can’t call Buckley up right now and—” 

Cassie stops. Miranda still has her phone. Her eyes shoot down to the pocket she knows it's waiting in. 

“I’m going to go out on a limb here — Is that the boy I saw you steal a pony with yesterday?” 

Cassie winces. “No.” 

Miranda just looks at her. 

“Yes. No. No. You don’t know me. Wait,  _ saw _ me?” 

Miranda snorts. “Well at this point I think I know you a bit better than you or I ever wanted me to, so how about we mosey on down to a place where you can see Montreal, we can stop getting to know each other, and I, at least, can be unconscious instead.” 

Unconscious equals bed. Bed equals hotel. Hotel equals minibar. 

“Ugh, fine, let’s go.” 

She grabs Miranda’s hand and takes the lead in a burst of energy, dragging her along with her onto a moving walkway. Her step onto the belt is a teensy bit too enthusiastic, and she giggles out a “Whoops!” as she leans against Miranda again to get her balance. 

“These are only faster than walking if you actually walk on them,” she says dryly, staring down at her with something Cassie can’t totally read as mild amusement or mild murder. Either way, Cassie’s pretty sure if she stares just a little harder into those cold, pale eyes of hers, she’ll either get dizzy enough to tip over, or she’ll be able to see herself reflected there, clinging to her arm for dear life. 

“Want to know something funny,” she says instead of walking, because, okay, maybe drink number seven had been bordering on excessive, even for her. 

“Not particularly, no.” 

“I’m actually almost never drunk in the airport. I mean, a little tipsy, sure, but this is the work. Place. Drinks are for  _ after _ work. But tonight, I am officially declaring that the airport is waaay more fun drunk than hungover. I mean, could you imagine if they had these out in the real world? Like, instead of sidewalks, you pop out of the bar and the ground just scoops you up and carries you straight to the subway? Fucking  _ genius. _ ” 

“Alright, genius, eyes front. We’re about at the end.” 

Cassie is still giggling as they pass the No Re-Entry signs and through to ground transportation. The cold air that smacks her in the face when the man in front of them triggers the automatic doors is a sharp hit of reality.

Miranda tugs out her phone. 

Cassie stares. 

Miranda notices and raises an eyebrow at her. 

Cassie just keeps staring. She stares all the way through Miranda saying a lot of words in French, some of which Cassie would probably be following just fine if she were a tiny bit more sober and a tiny bit less distracted by the fact that Miranda is  _ making a phone call. _

She waits till Miranda hangs up, then pounces. 

“Why do you get to keep your phone, huh? What’s that all about?” 

“That’s because this—” Miranda shakes the phone at her, and even though there’s probably a foot between her and it, Cassie feels like it comes  _ very _ close to her nose. “—is my not-for-work phone.”

Cassie blinks, still a little cross eyed. “What, like you’ve got dirty pictures on it?” 

“I— What?” Miranda stares at her in total bewilderment for a few seconds, and Cassie doesn’t actually have anything to offer to help her connect the dots since she was the one who said it, but luckily, it seems to click. “Not— Oh, Christ. Not for work. Not not  _ safe _ for— Oh, nevermind. As in, this is a phone that does not officially belong to me, which cannot be traced to me, for exactly times like this. Tell me, have you got one of those in your pre-packed luggage?” 

Cassie is still a little too bubbly to be insulted that Miranda seems to be judging her for having her suitcase already ready to go back at Annie’s. “Well, no, but—” 

“And we’ll get you one, but until then, no phone.” 

Cassie frowns. “Wait a minute. Why’re you even keeping it. Shouldn’t you have thrown it out somewhere already? Or— Ooh, do we have to destroy it so no one can figure out it was mine if they find it? Do we have to like—set it on fire? Drop it in a lake?” 

“And why exactly do you sound excited about that?” 

Cassie shrugs. “I dunno. I mean, it’d be nice to know what we’re doing is all, I guess. How this all works. I can be helpful, you know.” 

“Oh, yes, you’ve made that abundantly clear.” 

“Hey now. No. Listen.” Cassie summons her serious face. “I promise, you clue me in — give me one thing I should do — and before you know it I will have everything  _ totally _ under control.” 

“Get in the cab.” 

Cassie’s serious face scrunches up. “What?” 

Miranda steps to the curb and tugs open the rear door of a green-roofed, white-bellied taxi in a six-car line of its strangely colorful brethren. “Here’s your one thing. Hop in.” She emphasizes the open door with a sidelong nod of her head. 

Cassie keeps her chin high as she walks over and manages a reasonably graceful step from sidewalk to car floor. She keeps one leg out long enough to look up at Miranda and say, “See? What’d I say. Totally got this.” 

And Miranda absolutely rolls her eyes as she shuts her in, but she is, in fact, still kind of smiling. 

* * *

“Don’t unpack,” Miranda says in the hotel room. “We’ll only be here one night.” 

“I was just getting my toothbrush, sheesh. Can I get some PJs out or is that a little too moving-in for you.” 

There had been construction traffic between airport and hotel, leaving Cassie stuck on a longer drive than she would have guessed to get to here, and she had started to sober up. Barely three steps in the door of their double-queen and Miranda was back to getting on her nerves. 

“I just want to be sure you know we’ll have an early start tomorrow, and this is temporary.” 

“Cool, great, thanks.” 

Cassie shuts herself in the bathroom, catches one glimpse of herself in the mirror, and yanks on the hot water for a shower. When she takes the second look, toothbrush in mouth, she steps back over, sticks in the plug, and flips down the switch for a bath. Between the Lionfish wreck and fighting with Annie and sex with Buckley and waking up and drinks with Buckley and fighting with Annie and mechanical pony jail and Miranda, there hadn’t been a lot of time for the basics. She could only hope the dry shampoo from CVS on the way out and the at least marginally more clean I Heart NY hoodie  _ over _ the dirty shirt and the copious mouthwash had kept her from smelling too bad. She spits out the toothpaste. 

Alex is standing behind her in the mirror. 

She yelps and hits her hip on the counter, hard, and curses at the pain for good measure. 

“Everything alright in there?” Miranda calls from the other room. 

“Yeah, how are you really, Cassie?” Alex asks. 

“Fine,” she hisses at him, jabbing out with the toothbrush. 

“As much as I do not want to get between you and your bath—” 

Cassie hears footsteps approaching the door, but it’s not the bathroom door anymore, it’s the hotel door, the Bangkok hotel door. In here, it’s just her and Alex. 

“—if I hear screaming and banging I am going to have to assume you’re being murdered.” 

“What are we doing here?” Alex says evenly as Cassie sinks down against the gray sectional till her ass hits the floor. “Montreal? You said you were done running.” 

“I know I did,” she whimpers, then hates the sound of her voice and grits her teeth. “You don’t get to judge me for this. This was life or death. It’s different.” 

“Cassie? What’s going on?” Miranda’s voice is out of place; she doesn’t really hear it. 

“Oh, is it different? It wasn’t life or death when you ran away from that bedroom?” He jerks his thumb towards the door and Cassie knows, if she gets up, goes in, she’ll be talking to his corpse again. “It wasn’t life or death when you ran away from the scene of the crash and let your family think your dad died alone?” 

“Stop it,” Cassie whispers. “I told you I never told anyone that. I was trusting you. I told you I—” 

“Cassie, I’m counting to three and if you don’t answer me, I will break down this door so help me god.” 

“What does  _ she _ want with you, huh? Why would she take you along? You’re deadweight. She had to practically carry you out of that airport.” 

“One…” 

“Shut up,” she hisses. “I’m doing fine. I made it here just  _ fine _ . I’m not dead yet, am I?” 

“Oh, yeah, because that’s what matters, right? That  _ you _ make it out alive, screw whoever’s with you. You’ll take me down, you’ll take Max down, you’ll take Dad down. You’ll take Miranda down next, and you? You’ll still be here.” 

“ _ Two…” _

“But you’ll be alone.” 

“That’s—” Cassie’s breath catches, hard, in her throat. “That’s not fair. You’re supposed to be  _ nice _ , Alex. I can’t do this right now. I can’t, I— ” 

“Come on, that’s not how this works. You’re doing this to yourself, Cassie. You’re stuck on something and until you admit it, you’re as stuck with me as she is with you. You’re the one who decided to tag along when you know perfectly damn well that woman would only be sticking her neck out for you like this if—”

“—she still thinks I can get her the money.” 

“That’s fucking three!”

“Bingo,” Alex says, and the door behind him crashes in with an avalanche of reality. 

“Oh for fuck’s sake.” 

The bathroom comes back into focus. It’s all the wrong colors - green and white and poppy orange. Cassie realizes, all in terrible bits and pieces, what she must look like. She’s naked, on the floor, curled up against the cabinets under the sink, knees on chin, staring blankly at the wall. She’s got a toothbrush clenched in her left fist. Her other hand is wet. Her eyes slowly turn to stare up at Miranda in the doorway, catches a look half furious, half scared, before it’s smoothed over by a very  _ I’ll-handle-this _ mask as she steps over Cassie’s ankles and shuts off the water. 

Oh. Cassie finally looks over at her other side and realizes her hand is wet because there’s a puddle on the floor where the bath ran over. 

“Alright,” Miranda says, sitting down on the toilet lid and sticking her hand in the tub. “Whatever this is, you were probably on the right track for handling it. Give it three for the water to get down a bit, then get in and get your head on straight.” 

“Sorry,” Cassie whispers. 

“Nope, no, none of that.” She picks up a towel from the rack and drops it to soak up the puddle. “Between this and that scene you made in Sarah’s meeting, I know something’s the matter, you probably don’t want to tell me what it is, and I probably don’t want to know. But I don’t want you sitting on a floor in a puddle whether it’s made out of blood or bathwater so I’m going to have to ask you not to put a locked door between you and me again. Got it?” 

Cassie looks back up at the door. The lock mechanism is busted right through the trim. “Oh shit. I made you break the door?” 

Miranda’s hand comes up under her chin and forces her to meet her eyes. “Just noticed that, have you?” 

Cassie blinks a lot as Miranda’s hand turns her head left, right, then center again. 

“You  _ are _ fine, aren’t you? Didn’t hit your head.” 

Cassie nods against her fingers. “Yeah, I’m good. Just— I just—“ 

Miranda’s eyes are  _ very _ intense. It’s all a little too real just then. 

“Bath. I’m just gonna. You can let go now, ‘kay?” 

Miranda squints at her one last time, then gets up and let’s her hand drop away. “If you drown after all this, I am not going to be happy about it.” 

“Yeah, yup, no. No drowning.” She thinks about waiting in a ball on the floor till she hears Miranda shut the door, but her upper left thigh is cramping, and once she stretches out one leg, it doesn’t really matter anymore how naked she is. The bath is right there. She unfolds herself with more than one wince and gets in with all the dignity of a corgi trying to go up a staircase sideways. 

Well, at least the hot water feels really,  _ really  _ good. She groans and lets her head go under in a stream of bubbles. 

Underwater, the sound of the broken door closing is horribly squishy, like someone’s cutting into meat and scrapes bone. 

Cassie wonders if Miranda would bring her a drink in the bath if she says it’ll keep her from drowning. It’s not like it would be a lie. 


	3. Chapter 3

Cassie comes out wrapped in the complimentary bathrobe instead of her PJs, grabs a two-shot from the minifridge, and sits next to Miranda on her bed. 

“So what are these places? What am I looking at.” 

Miranda wasn't wrong. Compared to the first class flight, the hotel isn’t really that upscale, but it has a nice view of the city out of its two slim windows: all lights and medium-tall buildings spread out along dwindling corridors of sight till other buildings block whatever is in the darker, farther part of it all. 

Slowly, Miranda turns away from her phone. She glances at Cassie sidelong through a stray lock of hair, then follows her words out the window. “Well that — see the blue light in those arches? That’s the Basilica, and otherwise, don’t really know. I’ve spent very limited, focused time in Montreal.” 

“Huh.” Cassie’s surprised, but not for any reason she can get a next question out of. She tries to read signs on the buildings close to them, but anything that would tell her anything is closer to the ground, so she uncaps her drink and tips her head back, hearing the bubbles run from mouth to bottom. 

“You want to tell me what that was back there?” Miranda asks. 

Cassie’s chin jerks back down. “No.” 

“No?” 

“Nope. I want to have a drink and look at the weirdly blue stained glass windows. Besides, I thought you didn’t want to know.” 

“I don’t, but I probably should.” She takes the empty bottle out of Cassie’s hand and tosses it in the bedside trash. “I really am making you get up early. You’ll hate me less if you don’t get another one.” 

Cassie rolls her eyes and makes for the fridge. “It’s basically my whole job description to get up for six am flights after closing out a redeye in a bar. I’m not even buzzed anymore.” 

“Suit yourself,” Miranda says, and something about how truly uncaring, dismissive it is gives Cassie more pause than if she’d argued. Slowly, she shuts the fridge, hands still empty. She goes back to the bed. 

“Fine,” she says. 

Miranda looks over at her, leans back on one arm. “Well?” 

“Well what?” With a groan, she flops backwards. Feeling a folded throw under her, she grabs an edge and rolls herself over onto her stomach, wrapping herself up in it. “If we have to get up so early, shouldn’t we sleep and not talk.” 

“Fine, but in that case, I’d kindly ask you to get off my blanket. You’ve a whole side of the room for that.” 

But Cassie just got all bundled up. 

She doesn’t really want to explain to Miranda that sometimes she talks to the dead guy that got them both in this mess and sometimes, when she’s a little too sober _or_ a little too drunk, the head voice is louder than the outside voice and she misses things she doesn’t mean to, and something about hotels — _a shiny, grayscale praying mantis turns its head; an ice bucket crashes down like a firecracker on the too-thin industrial carpet_ — just make it all that much worse. But she also doesn’t want to explain to herself, or to Miranda, that it's worst of all when she’s alone, and this bed is a little island where someone else is riding out the crazy with her, which the other bed is not. 

So she has to say something. 

“I guess I just… I haven’t really stopped since this started, you know? Since that night, it's just been one thing after another and sometimes when I stop and— and breathe, or whatever… It was bad, okay? If you didn’t kill him maybe you don’t even know but… that was a _lot_ of blood.” 

“ _If_ I didn’t kill him?” 

Cassie rolls the other way, keeping the blanket fully employed as the tortilla to her burrito, but lying on her back again so she can look up at Miranda’s amused-insulted glare. 

“You still don’t trust me, even about that?” 

Cassie thinks about it. “Maybe a little. Anyway that’s not what I meant.” 

Miranda’s lips twitch. “I’ll take ‘a little.’” 

A wave of exhaustion hits hard. All in one go, she feels how dry her eyes are. The stucco ceiling is all blurred at the edges, making the whole thing one grainy spiderweb. 

“You were saying?” Miranda prompts, and Cassie curls sideways, knees up and in, so she can stare at the nothing of the blanket instead of Miranda or the web. 

“Nothing. That’s it. Just a little good old fashioned traumatized, here, nice to have you along for the ride.” 

Miranda lets out a huff of air that might have been a laugh, and that makes Cassie feel a little better. She closes her eyes. 

“Alright, I can work with that. Believe it or not, but a good scare from half a decade ago can still shake me on a bad day.” 

“Really?” Cassie mumbles into the comforter. 

“No, but it wouldn’t be the end of the world if it did.” Miranda’s voice is getting further away, now. “You could be doing a lot worse, all things considered.” 

“That’s what I told Alex,” she thinks, or maybe says. In the pause, she starts to feel the slow-drown of her heartbeat leveling out. 

“You aren’t getting up again, are you?” 

Cassie’s just about underwater, so maybe she heard the question, and maybe it was followed by a sigh and the feeling of a fingertip moving a bit of hair off the bridge of her nose and tucking it behind her ear, but maybe it was just head-Alex, and either way, what an obvious question. Of course she’s not getting up again. 

* * *

It’s not even light out when the hotel alarm clock starts playing radio static at six hundred decibels. 

“Noooo,” Cassie whines. 

“Yep, up and out,” Miranda’s voice says from somewhere far enough away she obviously got up before the alarm. 

Miranda’s voice. 

Miranda. 

“Shit,” Cassie whispers. Her eyes crack open. They’re as dry as last night. Her head is thick and unhappy. And she’s really here, in this bed. Or, well, _in_ is kind of a stretch. One leg is dangling off the edge, held up in a precarious sling where the throw blanket got trapped under her ass which took on the extra leg weight. The actual bed part of the bed is empty one blink, then full the next, as Alex’s too-cheery morning face greets her. Staring up at his little smile, she asks, “I didn’t really do this, did I?” 

“Which part?” he asks, patting the pillow next to him like he wants her to crawl up beside him, which she is absolutely not going to do, because that would involve moving. “The part where you got on a plane to Montreal with the homicidal crazy lady who’s been stalking you, or the part where you got so drunk you made her break down a door, or the part where you crawled into her bed and fell asleep at the foot of it like a _good little doggie?_ ” 

“All of it,” she groans. 

“Good, you’re up.” 

The room zooms back into focus. 

Miranda’s standing at the bedside table, already fully dressed in a black button-down, black slacks, black heeled boots. She hits the button on the clock that finally stops the dead-air screaming of the radio and picks up her phone where it’s plugged in, charging. “We’ll be meeting a contact for our new identities in less than an hour.” 

“Didn’t we fly here with our new identities?” Cassie mumbles, burying her face. 

“No, we flew here with our old new identities, which will now go on and fly off without us. Can’t leave one place as the same person you pick up as. Not if you don’t want to be found in a week.” 

“Ok,” Cassie mumbles. Without the noise, the heavy eyelids are winning again. 

Miranda claps right above her ear, and she flinches. 

“Up! Lets go. Where are these famous six am flight skills of yours.” 

“It can’t be six yet,” she groans, but she forces her knees up under her boobs till she’s hunched over in child’s pose, counts to eight, then forces herself up to kneeling from there. She swings a leg over onto the floor. The clock says she’s right. It’s 4:32 am. “Oh, I hate this,” she adds, swaying for a second as a lot of blood and mistakes try to work themselves into her brain all in one go. The bathrobe is untied and definitely open straight down the front of her, and she does not care. 

Suitcase. Unzip. Shirt. Bra. Pants. Bra. Socks. Hoodie. Underwear. Rezip. Front pocket. Hairbrush. Lip gloss. Mascara. Concealer. 

It’s not till she’s in the bathroom that she even notices she’s holding two bras. She’s better at this when it's after five. What kind of criminals work at four in the morning and not like, midnight? She comes out dressed and un-bedheaded and stuffs the extra bra back where it belongs. 

“Under five minutes. Alright, I’m almost impressed.” 

“Why thank you,” Cassie says, trying to wake up her polite sarcasm muscles. 

Miranda leads them out into the hall. Pausing in the doorway, Cassie stares back over her shoulder. “We don’t have to—” She waves a hand at the bathroom. “—something—the... door?” 

Miranda rolls her eyes. “It’s a hotel. They’ve seen worse. They can bill Katherine O’Brian.” 

“Customer service people must really like you,” she mutters, but follows her down the hall. 

As they wait for the elevators, Miranda digs a twenty out of her purse and hands it to her. “Get us coffee while I check out?” 

“God yes,” she agrees. 

* * *

There’s a functionally sleek black hatchback waiting for them in the hotel garage. 

“Whose car is this?” 

“Mine,” Miranda answers evenly. 

“I thought you said you don’t spend any time in Montreal. Why do you have a car here?” 

“I didn’t say it was mine yesterday.” 

Cassie climbs in a little nervously, but there are no obvious dead bodies in the passenger seat. She crans her neck towards the back. Also no dead bodies. There’s a black bag on the middle seat. Too small for bodies. Maybe one really little body. Like, a baby body. Or a bunny body.

Bad, bad brain place.

“Where are we going?” she asks in a voice three steps higher than her last question. 

“Are you always this chatty in the morning?” 

“I’m generally a very chatty person, yes.” 

“Well, if you could not be for the next twenty minutes or so while I remember how to get there, I’d appreciate that.” 

Cassie decides maybe it’s better if she doesn’t antagonize the woman chauffeuring her to her new life no matter what might be in the baby-sized backseat bag. She nurses her coffee as Miranda pulls out into the early-morning crawl of a still sleepy city. 

Fifteen minutes later, she lets out a quiet, “Fuck,” one black-gloved hand hitting the side of the steering wheel just hard enough for the sound to echo over the engine. “There’s no sign. There was a little red sign before.” 

Cassie starts catching the nervous energy, her knee bouncing under the glove compartment. Her seat is weirdly far forward, she finally notices, and digs around for the bar to slide it back. No luck. While she’s rummaging, Miranda takes four left turns in as quick succession as the city lets her, putting them back where they were three blocks ago. 

“What are we looking for?” Cassie hesitantly asks, squinting out the window while still half hunched and fishing around under the seat.

“Garage,” Miranda says, clipped. “Not public parking. Underground, so there _should_ be a fucking ramp around here.” She keeps glancing at the clock as they pass all the same buildings again, then yanks them hard into the same left turn lane for another circuit. “For fucks sake, I could’ve used a new landmark, Jenny,” she mutters under her breath. 

“Any chance it has a loading dock door?” 

Miranda pulls up to the second-to-last red light and looks over at her. “A what?” 

“A— “ The light turns. “Here, stay slow, one sec. There.” She points, arm stretched out diagonal and almost touching the steering wheel. “See that? With the black and yellow side thingies? Side guards? The rollup door.” 

The airport has whole banks of them — cargo ready for ground transport, weapons successfully smuggled from airplane underbelly to unmarked truck, you know, normal airport things. 

Miranda doesn’t react as it sneaks up alongside them, then she stops, hits the turn signal, and waits till two cars empty the other lane. 

As they pull up in the unlit, industrial-style bay, a single green blinker registers their approach on the left, and the door begins to pull up overhead, fast and silent. “Well, that’s new,” Miranda murmurs. 

“Hell yes,” Cassie congratulates herself as she simultaneously figures out that the seat has a side-lever instead of a bar. She pushes herself luxuriously far back, stretching out her legs and shooting Miranda a grin. 

Miranda doesn’t acknowledge her. She drives them down into a bank of underground parking that could have belonged to any old mall or office complex. Cars are parked, enough that if she didn’t know what they were here for, Cassie wouldn’t think anything weird could be going down in a place with this many signs of life. 

One level lower than the street, headlights flash ahead and to the left. 

“Was that a signal,” Cassie breathes, sitting up sharply in her seat. 

For a moment, Miranda keeps her silence, and Cassie thinks she’ll get an eyeroll, but it doesn’t come. Instead, she slows the car, passes where the light went off, and reverses into a spot at the start of the next bend. 

“You’d be good at my job,” she says idly. 

Cassie stares at her. 

“I mean that. You’ve got eyes, you’ve got instincts. You’ve got motivation now, too.” 

Surprised, all Cassie can think to blurt out is, “Do you call it that?” 

“What?”

“A job.”

Miranda gives her an odd look. “I do my work, I get paid. What would you call it.” 

Cassie shrugs. “A job, sure. I just… I dunno, I was just curious. Like, if you were a serial killer and _not_ getting paid, would you call it a hobby?” 

Miranda rolls her eyes. “I could start today.” 

Cassie puts up her hands. “Right!” she says. “Alright, I got it. Quiet. You can take care of business, you won’t even know I’m here.” 

Miranda’s lips do that thinning thing that Cassie’s starting to recognize as not the smile, but the start of it getting killed before it can happen. She’s still for long enough that it makes Cassie antsy. Right when she’s getting ready to give up on the quiet streak, Miranda turns around, reaches over the center console, picks up the bag, and drops it in Cassie’s lap. 

“You do it.” 

“Ex _cuse_ me?” 

“C’mon, you’re on point. You’re curious, and I’m not wrong that you’ll do just fine. Take the bag, walk over to the blue car that just flashed its lights, and drop it in the passenger window. Wait while they check it over, then take what they hand you. You’ll feel better, after, if you know you can handle the little parts like this. Or, you can wait in the car.” 

“No, no, nope.” Cassie clutches the bag tight to her chest when Miranda holds her hand out for it. “I can do this. Sure, me, yeah. Bag, blue car, window, wait, take something. Got it.” She vigorously nods her head. “Yeah. Okay.” 

Then she takes four tries to unbuckle her seatbelt and two to get the door open, but she does, and she gets out, and she even remembers to close it behind her so it's not… weird, just walking away from a car in a garage with the door wide open. And it's _loud_ , her footsteps echoing, but that just means she can hear that they’re steady. Not fast, not slow, not shaky. She’s walking, like a normal person with a normal bag through a normal garage towards another totally normal blue sedan by a totally normal concrete pillar with a sign that says _SORTIE_ and has a little cartoon figure walking towards the rectangular impression of a door and maybe seeing no sign of the real door makes her a little extra nervous, but then she’s there, and sure enough the window is rolled down, and she drops the bag in and thinks it’s a little like taking out the trash in her old apartment where the third and fourth floors had chutes down to some invisible dumpster — just right on in the hatch. 

Then she doesn’t look inside, because Miranda didn’t tell her to, but then she wonders how she’ll know someone is trying to hand her something if she doesn’t look, so she counts to fifteen and then does look, and all she can see is that the bag is gone, and someone’s hip is wearing blue jeans in the driver’s side seat. 

She counts to fifteen again. It's perfect timing — an envelope, gloved fingers holding one end, outstretched just below the lip of the window. 

She takes it, says “Thanks,” because even though Miranda did not tell her to do that, it’s only polite, right? Then she walks all the way back again, a little faster because the end is in sight, in the safe black car where Miranda is waiting. 

Her teeth start chattering when she slides back into her seat. It’s chilly down here, but it isn’t _that_ cold. Miranda gives her a look, then lets the smile happen as she takes the envelope from Cassie’s lightly shaking fingers. “Good girl,” she murmurs, and Cassie feels the tips of her ears turn red in one fast rush. Combined with the teeth chattering and the general trembling in all her extremities, she thinks adrenaline might be here to cash in on the early heart attack she knows she’s been bottling her way towards for years, but are heart attacks supposed to be all warm and twisty and fizzy like this? 

Miranda doesn’t even open the envelope. Just slides it in one of the big, dark pockets of her coat, starts the engine, and drives them off into the sunrise.


	4. Chapter 4

“This is like, a house.” 

Cassie stops in the doorway as Miranda continues in with her suitcase. 

“It is,” she agrees. 

“Why… How are we staying in a house?” 

“Less public security than an apartment complex,” Miranda says casually from somewhere out of sight. Cassie hasn’t budged, though she does manage to shut the door behind her after Miranda says that because that sounds like something maybe the next-door-neighboring townhouse doesn’t need to hear. 

“Right but… I mean, sheesh. How are we affording this?” 

“I’m sorry,” Miranda’s head pops back around the corner. “Were you paying for any of this, or do you still owe me a grand for your bail?” 

Cassie grimaces. “I mean, how are _you_ affording this.” 

Miranda gives her a _that’s right_ look, then goes back to whatever she’s doing in a room Cassie can only kind of see. There’s a sliding glass door over there, and she thinks maybe there’s a microwave and some cabinets reflected in it. 

“This house belongs to someone who likes to buy things, but has fuck all interest in living in Canada, or any of the other fifteen countries where she keeps property.” 

“So… what,” Cassie asks, staring at the fully furnished entryway, the living room where she can just see the back of a deep green couch, the glimpse of kitchen where Miranda vanished. “Is she just going to show up one day and find us squatting in her house?” 

Just like that, Miranda’s back in view, the look of complete and total exasperation having taken over her face. “No, are you not listening? She will literally never come here. This is a place for fixing fuck-ups and stashing away problems you don’t want to deal with, which are both things we are right now.” 

“Oh.” 

Miranda starts to vanish again, then pauses, squinting down the hallway at her. Cassie isn’t moving, just hovering blankly, staring at the two framed landscape photographs on the wall. 

Miranda throws up her hands, then starts back towards her, walking fast. “Stop loitering in the hallway.” She grabs hold of Cassie’s wrist and pulls her into the living room, her suitcase stumbling along behind on one wheel till it hits the rug and Cassie just lets go, hearing the handle thud down behind them. “Why do you look like the house is going to bite you?” she asks, manhandling her by the shoulders until she can half-push Cassie down onto the couch. The couch is velvet. That’s really weird. Why would anyone buy a green velvet couch. 

“I do not understand what’s happening here,” she admits, running her hands back and forth over the couch cushions, with the grain, against the grain, with the grain… As she stares at the honest to god fireplace in the wall, she keeps trying to do the math. When was the last time she stayed in a house? There was the memorial, Alex’s memorial, and that was weird for a whole host of other reasons but she wasn’t like… moving in. For really obvious, expensive reasons, no one she knows in the city has a house. She hasn’t… It’s been a lot of years, a lot of apartments, and _so_ many hotels. Like, a lot a lot of years. Like, the last house was when it was her, and Davey, and Mom, and Dad. That kind of a lot. The last time they used the fireplace, it was a bitingly cold February. Mom kept dropping hints about the electric bill and Dad had the oh-so-spontaneous idea to chop some logs in the yard, pile them up and in between the bricks on top of some super old coals from a fire that must have been _years_ ago, and when the smoke just kept pouring into the apartment instead of out, Dad laughed and coughed and laughed and laughed, and told her to keep throwing logs in until Mom came home and started yelling, and Dad reminded her this was her idea in the first place, and then the birds nest blocking the chimney broke free and fell right on top of the blaze— 

“And?” Miranda prompts, still standing in front of her, arms crossed over her chest, waiting because Cassie… wandered off again. 

She scrambles for normal human words. “And it seems really, really weird that we can just walk into a whole ass townhouse like we own the place.” 

Miranda sighs, then sits down next to Cassie on the ridiculous couch. “Let’s try this again. Here’s how this works. When you do a job like I do, the most important thing to do is to get yourself outs. Not the kind of outs your work gives you. Those keep you in business. But that’s it. They’re only as good as you are good with your boss. I have outs that come from people who don’t know who I work for. Who can’t sell me out to them even if they want to, and who don’t want to, because I’ve done good business with them. My own business, not Victor’s. They like me, _and_ they owe me. The woman who owns this property is one of those people. That’s why we can do this.” 

“So this is just like…. A safe house for evil people?” 

“You know, that’s not quite how I’d... I— Fine. Yes, sure. This is a safe house for evil people.” 

“Okay.” Cassie pats the cushion twice. “Okay.” She decides she can roll with that. 

She gets up, leaving her suitcase on the rug, and steps over it into the kitchen. “Do safe houses for evil people come stocked with— Oh hell yes.” 

The fridge is empty, but there's a fully stocked liquor cabinet overhead. Cassie finds glasses in another cupboard and pours herself a shot, fully registering that the clock in front of her over the stove says 7:52 am. Head back, glass down on the granite counter hard enough for the sound to chase the alcohol like a bullet. She shakes herself the rest of the way awake, a full body motion. “Brrrr. Alright.” Claps her hands together. “Unpacking. On it.” 

Miranda watches her in the open space that leads from kitchen to living room, looking on with mild disbelief and a raised eyebrow, but doesn’t get in Cassie’s way as she crosses back, collects her suitcase, and starts up the stairs. 

She picks the bedroom on the left, closer to the bathroom, farther from the linen closet. It’s a two bed, one-and-a-half-bath, she counts; the upstairs is a little smaller and closer than the downstairs because, she can see out her bedroom window, the downstairs has a gorgeous little fenced in patio, all gray flagstone, black furniture with little red and gray cushions, potted plants that are definitely dead but still look kind of pretty all dusted with snow. 

“Oh shit, it’s snowing.”

A non-committal sound of acknowledgement floats up the stairs. 

She can’t tell for sure from up here, but that tarp-covered lump in the corner of the patio is either some kind of table-and-grill situation, or a hot tub. She has mixed feelings about hot tubs right now. Well, Bangkok wasn’t _really_ a hot tub, she should be able to get past the weird and enjoy a nice… 

Unpacking. She can enjoy and/or be stressed about more things _after_ unpacking. Back to business. 

She adds the nicer half of her clothes to the closet, trying not to be weirded out that there are already several garment bags hanging there like the ghosts of whatever the last evil people were who unpacked and slept and dressed in this room. She resists the urge to unzip any of them. What if there’re no clothes and the bags are just stuffed with money? What if there _are_ clothes, but they’re covered in dried blood? 

She pulls _Crime and Punishment_ out of the backside pocket of her suitcase next. The pocket is the one designed to hold a few papers, now stretched awkwardly with the exact shape of the paperback imprinted on the cloth. She remembers the moment she stuffed it in there, back in her own apartment, after Miranda broke in, when she thought it would be weird, maybe, if someone else found it there. In her bed. 

“I hope Annie got my note,” she mutters. She left a sticky under her big shampoo on Annie’s counter on her way out, feeling super, super shitty that not only had she not done what Annie asked, but then had snuck into her apartment for her stuff while Annie was out trying to save her ass, and all she could do was leave her some liquids that were too many ounces for the plane and a note that says “Sorry. I love you.” 

Over her shoulder, Miranda says, “Little green sticky?” 

Cassie flinches and drops the book. She didn’t even hear her come upstairs. She wipes one eye with her sleeve and nods. 

“Yep, no. I tossed that.” 

“You _what_?” 

Cassie whirls around to face her. 

“Definitely threw that in the trash.” She’s completely unapologetic. “You can’t walk around leaving little notes that say ‘sorry’ on them without it looking like you’ve got something to be sorry for.” 

“Well, yeah, that’s— I do. I have several things, actually. Like, at least a dozen things and that’s just with Annie. I got her boyfriend hit by a car, I let Buckley drink her really nice vodka before I even introduced him, I told her to stick her neck out for you then fucking fled the country instead of doing the one thing she asked me to, I mean, I probably made her quit her job out of some kind of—” 

“Right. Well, that is quite a lot, yeah. But at least now you don’t also have to say sorry for leaving behind evidence that suggests she might know where you got off to, or might have helped you do it.” 

“That’s not what I—” Cassie starts, raising a hand up to… point accusingly at nothing? Wave it around? She ends up pressing it against her stomach, and it’s like all the air pushes out of her with it. She deflates. “I just…” 

“You’re trying very hard,” Miranda says, voice a little softer. She steps up next to Cassie and her half unpacked bag. “To do the right thing.” She shifts, hesitates a second, then her hand comes up and cups Cassie’s cheek. She’s still wearing her black leather gloves, and they’re chilly against Cassie’s skin, like she just came in with the gathering snow. “For a bunch of people who you can’t be held accountable to anymore, do you get that?” 

Cassie’s eyes blink wide to closed to wide again. 

“They aren’t here. It’s just you, and me, and staying alive.” 

Cassie starts nodding, and keeps nodding, then all of a sudden it changes and she’s shaking her head no, and her nose is stuffy and her eyes are stinging and she does _not_ want to do what some weird... travel… stress… hormones are telling her to do right now, not while Miranda is six inches away and trying to tell her to get her shit together. 

She turns away, tugging another neatly folded shirt out of her bag. It unravels in her hands. She starts folding it up again, then sets it on the bed and dives in for the next one. Unpacking. This is unpacking. She’s on it. 

“Cassie.” 

At Miranda’s voice, she hiccups back a horrible sound, and tears start dripping down her cheeks. “Shit,” she whispers, the jeans in her hands jittering with the shaking of her hands. 

“Cassie, look at me.” 

She doesn’t even realize she’s glaring till she turns around, and there’s Miranda, unmoved, just looking at her, watching her lose her absolute god for fucking shit. 

So she says, “I’m fine.” 

“Yeah, no, you’re not that,” Miranda says, taking the jeans out of her hands and tossing them on the bed, unfolded. Cassie makes to turn back around and grab them up again, but Miranda catches her by the shoulders and forces her to stay eye to eye. “I said look at me. Not glare, just look. Alright. And… breathe.” 

Almost against her will, Cassie feels her lungs fill up through her stuffy nose in a long, harsh inhale. 

“That’s right.” 

The exhale is half a sob, but it levels out at the end as her lungs empty, and it's like her head empties along with it, the whirl back through the last forty-eight hours of guilt and pain and escape and sobriety and fear and escape and whatever-the-hell-this-is and guilt all over again… 

“You’re not fine, but we’re going to be,” Miranda says, voice a little strained, but surprisingly soft. “You’ve just got to let everything that happened before we walked through that door pass through you. This is what’s real now.” 

Cassie sniffs again. “I know,” she says, and it’s a pitiful sound, but it’s words, and there are more words stuck behind those words that just burst out of her. “I just— I feel like I was— I was so close to… to something, back there, back home, and I said things that really hurt people but then I started to fix it and right when I was t-this close…” She squeezes her eyes shut, remembering, out of everything, her night in jail, and that’s just… _raw_ , like that smelly beige cell scraped her skin off and if she thinks about it too hard she’ll start bleeding again. 

No bleeding on the nice, new bed in the nice, new house with this not-that-nice, probably-feral-enough-to-give-her-rabies woman who might be being surprisingly nice in the moment, but is also telling her to breathe like she might snap at any second and break something if she doesn’t. Nope. No breaking, no bleeding.

“I need a drink,” she decides out loud, and flees around Miranda down the stairs. 

Miranda doesn’t follow her. 

Cassie is acutely aware of this fact because she tells herself she’ll pour till she hears Miranda coming her way, but the house is silent, and the glass is full to the brim, which is not a measure of hard liquor anyone should be drinking out of any one glass, but hey. Cassie made the deal with herself, so now she gets to drink down the spoils instead of bleeding guilt everywhere. Everybody wins. 

She puts her chin at counter level to sip enough off the top that it’s safe to pick up. 

Over the rim, she spies the envelope sitting in the middle of the table. The envelope. The one she got from the blue car in the creepily normal garage. Door keys on two little green plastic fobs stick out of the flap like weird little goblin ears. 

She glances around surreptitiously as if the neighbors might be reading their extra secret mail through the patio door, but the light is hazy with snow, and the snow is empty. Now that her drink is low enough not to spill, she steps over. Thumbs up the flap. Slides out the first few bits of paper and plastic. IDs. Two of them. One of them has her face on it. The name next to the picture — which she has no memory of having taken, but she looks pretty good — is Sandra Conti. She stares, fingering the edge, not willing to pick it up. That’s not her. That’s not her name (though it's weirdly close to it for a fake identity), that’s not her birthday, so it’s not her face. It’s not her. And the one beside it. Renee Walsh. Miranda is so strikingly _Miranda_ in the photograph — hair pulled back, skin starkly close over eerily prominent bones. But it’s not _her_ Miranda, the one upstairs telling her to breathe. It’s not the one who she doesn’t _really_ owe bail money to because it really doesn’t count as posting someone’s bail if you do it just to pull a gun on them. This isn’t the Miranda she agreed to go to Montreal with. These aren’t them. These are two totally different people and she’s just… here, invading their lives she knows nothing about, drinking their vodka, watching their snow. 

“I’m going out to pick up some things,” not-Miranda calls from the stairs. “Food. Basics. Be alright for a few hours?” 

“Mmhmm,” Cassie’s voice comes out thin, lips buzzing the edge of the almost empty glass. 

“Good.” The door opens with that quietly heavy sound, the air-fighting drag of a _real_ door, the kind you don’t get in an apartment building or a hotel where all the doors just go to another hallway. “Don’t do anything stupid.” 

It swing-clicks closed. 

“Right, because you never do anything stupid,” Alex says. The Bangkok hotel is colder than she remembers. There’s a little souvenir snow globe on the bedside table. She’s sitting on the edge of the bed, and she has a bad feeling about how he’ll be, behind her, reclined against the pillows. So she doesn’t look. She stares into the swirling snow in its tiny, perfect bubble. Underneath one of its little clawed feet sits the envelope, barely clinging to the lip of the wood. 

“I never do anything stupid,” Cassie echoes numbly. 

“Right, like you didn’t just get yourself fifteen times more involved than you needed to when you agreed to pick up those documents.” 

Here, in head-Bangkok, her false ID says Alessandra Ricci. She picks it up, and the envelope falls to the floor. This one feels right in her hand. This one feels like her. “I already fled the country, Alex.” 

“You could have done that legally, you know. You were literally about to fly to Rome. You haven’t been accused of a crime, but you took off with a _known murderer_ , and then you went and exchanged a bag full of cash for falsified documents. You actually are a criminal now. You get that, right?” 

“I already broke into Lionfish.” 

“Max broke into Lionfish.” 

“We definitely both broke into Lionfish. Not even you can convincingly say just because I wasn’t the one who took the chain off the door that I wasn’t a criminal when I went inside and busted into the server room. We used _my_ Hello Kitty flash drive.” 

“That? That was like, Robin-Hood criminal. Snoop on the rich to try and take care of your best friend. This? You didn’t have to do this. But you did it anyway. You had a perfectly good opportunity to just sit in the car and keep quiet but instead you just… said yes. There’s a difference. You get that, right?” 

“ _Yes_ , Alex, I get that.” 

“You can’t just turn around now and go home.” 

“I get that,” she says, louder, and she does. She glances over her shoulder at him. He’s fully dressed, and not bleeding. “You’re starting to sound like her.” 

“Am I?” He looks genuinely surprised. 

“ _Ye geht tha’?”_ she echoes him, imitating Miranda’s accent, terribly. “I get it,” she says all in one exasperated groan. “I get what I’m doing. I’m owning this. All of it. Like I said. I’m fine. This is a… a really weird, weirdly nice townhouse. I can handle a wintery, townhouse-y, Canadian vacation. I can handle exchanging a bag of _probably_ money for some fake IDs. I had a fake ID in high school.” 

“Right, and it wasn’t just people in town feeling sorry for the kid with the dead dad that meant you could get away with picking up beer at the 7/11 on that thing.” 

“Shut up,” Cassie gasps, feeling her lungs seize like a gut-punch. “God, do you have to be such an asshole, Alex? Ever since she said you were good you’ve been the absolute _worst_.” 

“It’s almost like you didn’t take her word for that. Don’t you trust her?” 

“Okay, now you _really_ sound like her. I don’t have to listen to you. I don’t need two Mirandas.” 

“But you do need one.” 

All at once, the snow fills an entire sliding glass door again. The bed is gone. The kitchen table is round, pale wood. Her ID says Sandra Conti. Her glass is empty. 

The house is empty. 

Cassie shivers. 

“I do not,” she whispers. 

The silence presses in for all of fifteen seconds before she can’t take it anymore. She dashes upstairs, changes into something a little more new-me-new-city, layers on her coat, snatches the keys and ID off the table, and wanders out into the snow.


	5. Chapter 5

To her credit, she does lunch, walking till her ankles are cold, coffee shop, walking, random boutique, random bookstore, more walking, sunset on a bridge, and _almost_ walking all the way back to the house before she says fuck-it and goes in the club she passed three blocks in.

It’s not loud or crowded yet, just warming up from dinner-bar to bar-bar, so she gets to get chatty and friendly with the bartender before the music gets loud. He’s kinda pretty, and she’s almost convinced he’s more than work-flirting, but he swings by less and less as the bar fills up, and then there are plenty of new strangers to distract her and help her keep snagging drinks. 

A bigger, brawnier fella who definitely said a lot of words to her she couldn’t hear with his head sixteen inches above hers tries to get her onto the dance floor, but it’s still a little sparse. Cassie likes to dance when it’s the middle of the day and she’s the entire spotlight, or when it’s the middle of a crowd, and she can entirely disappear into a flashing mess of everyone she might go home with later, and right now, this club is in limbo.

“Later,” she insists, running her hand down his chest. She’s not into him. Yet. But there’s plenty of night to go, and who’s she kidding. She’ll get into him as well as anybody by the time it's home with or home without. 

He flexes under her fingers. She stares at his tight, striped polo, a little disturbed by the movement in a way she can’t shake, like she reached out to brush a mannequin and felt it breathing. 

_“Plus tard?”_ she tries again when she realizes he’s bending down his far-away head to hear her and might have mouthed _quoi?_ at her. “Later.”

He shakes his head. “I can’t talk you into now?” Oh, thank god, she really hasn’t been feeling up for French. She hasn’t been on a Paris route in actual years, and it's all jumbled up with the tiny bits of Korean, Chinese, Thai, Italian, and Greek from much more recent overnights. 

“Later, I mean it. You come back for me.” She taps her nose with her finger and bats her eyelashes.

He begins to back away from the bar, keeping hold of her hand, trying to coax her away. 

When she stays put, shaking her head, giving him puppy eyes, he lets go with a very teethy smile, and she turns back to claim another drink. 

Miranda is standing right behind her. 

“Hooooly shit,” she gasps, almost sliding off the bar stool. “Are you trying to kill me?” 

“Honestly starting to think I might have to,” Miranda says. Her eyes are steel. She’s in the same all black getup she was wearing at four am, but somehow, she’s making it blend in here. Maybe there’s an extra button undone, or maybe it’s just the fact that the jacket is draped over one arm, so the neckline of her shirt all but fully exposes her shoulder when she’s leaning against the bar like this, caging Cassie in. “Tell me you didn’t use your card.” 

Cassie takes a long, slow sip of her cocktail, trying to get her heartbeat back to normal after the jump scare, refusing to rise to the bait. “I might be new to all this, but I’m not a total idiot, Miranda. I paid cash.” 

“Where’d you get the cash?” 

“Back in New York, at an ATM, before literally any of this started." 

She frowns. "Well... good. But that still doesn't excuse wandering off to fuck knows where. Do you know how long I've been looking for you?"

Refusing to let the embarrassment rising in her chest win, Cassie shrugs and looks for an escape. "I’m just… getting to know my new city. Now excuse me, because that guy there asked me to dance.” 

Miranda’s hand catches her forearm. There’s some real nails in her grip. “You may not know this about me yet because all things considered, I’ve been a very patient woman when it comes to you, but I have something of a temper, and I am _this_ close to losing it.” 

She holds her fingers up very, very close together, and very close to Cassie’s face. 

“Sure I do,” Cassie answers. “I heard you go completely apeshit on Alex’s computer.” 

“You what?” Miranda breathes, shock evident and cutting through the anger. 

“Have a drink!” she offers instead of elaborating, sliding what was going to be her absolutely-lost-count-ieth cocktail over to her very-close-to-losing-it companion. “And relax, ‘kay? I’m being stupid, but I’m not being _stupid_ stupid.” 

“I’m sure the distinction is lost on me.” Her words are dry, and her grip on Cassie’s arm is still firm. “What were you doing in Alex’s apartment? _How_ were you in Alex’s apartment?” 

“Really, that’s what you want to ask me right now? Nuh-uh.” 

“Cassie, I am warning you—” 

“Hey babe, everything cool here?” 

Cassie looks up into the extra-tall eyes of her escape route. It’s a little soon for ‘babe’, but he’s got a drink in each hand and a lot of… well, the usual stuff. Hands. Arms. Legs. A little bit of facial hair and that dumb striped shirt. And all of that is preferable to angry Miranda, who left her alone in a fucking townhouse, to go get fucking... groceries, or whatever. 

“Yep,” Cassie says, prying Miranda’s hand off her arm and basically throwing herself at him. “All good here. But I missed you already. Let's _dance_.” 

She refuses to look back over her shoulder as he steers her into the crowd. The songs have been shifting all night, getting louder and bassier as the lights get darker and flashier, so Cassie lets it all thrum down into her hips as she polishes off one of tall-fella’s two glasses, and gets into the right state of being to sway, grind, and spin. 

Unfortunately, her escape route of choice is really only into the middle bit. He plants one hand on her hip and does not let go through somewhere between one and three songs — there aren’t enough lyrics to actually tell where one ends and next begins. Cassie is never opposed to a little foreplay in her dancing — like, to be clear, that’s usually ninety percent of the point if she’s dancing with anyone who isn’t a coworker and/or friend — but this one is being especially handsy, and— 

“Oof,” she mutters as his Texas-style, cowboy-ass belt buckle digs into her lower back for the thirtieth time. What kind of idiot wears a goddamn dinner plate an inch over his dick when he wants to get his grind on? “Okay,” she turns in his arms, “I’m just gonna... “ steals his drink, which has managed to go un-spilled because the literal only thing this guy is moving is his thrust-muscles, “...do a little this, maybe,” she finishes, wrapping her arms around his neck, drink in hand, which… kind of just makes her elbows hurt, but at least her back is getting a break. 

He leans in for a kiss, taking advantage of both freed hands to just… grope her. Not a dancy kind of grope. Just an open-palms-on-ass, stress-ball-squeeze kind of grope, and it’s cringey enough that Cassie drops his neck, shoves the drink in between them and throws it back, forcing him to stay up where he is or get a nose full of the bottom of her glass. 

Ooh. _Lot_ of vodka in that. 

“Wanna grab us two more?” she asks. 

Amazingly, he lets go with a nod, making for the bar, which gives Cassie a blissful few minutes of grooving on her own, letting the last two drinks sink into her bloodstream. She closes her eyes, willing herself a better, more familiar dance partner — Alex, by the window, looking out over Bangkok. Except the skyline is a little muddled, now. There’s a blue-lit cathedral as tall as any of the skyscrapers, and a glittering curtain of falling snow… 

The fantasy can’t survive the return of Belt Buckle. He’s _so grabby_. The minute she takes the drink, he’s got his hands on her waist again, uncomfortably high, and she’s left with a resigned sway and a hazy kind of wondering whether this is it: she has finally met a reasonably attractive bar patron that no amount of vodka will make her willing to go home with. She tries to get a little bit of space back, shimmying forward. 

He reels her in, hard. “Okay, ow, _ouch."_ The belt hits her right in the spine and just keeps pushing. “Jesus, let go.” She tries to pry off his hands, but her grip on hand-hand coordination is a little fuzzy, and her words are just getting swallowed up in a poorly-timed bass drop. She feels him bending, breath hot on her neck, and her dizzy is starting to feel a lot less fun-dizzy and a lot more might-need-a-trip-to-a-stall-to-throw-up-in dizzy — if she can just... get... his damn… hands… _off of her._

“Ow, Jesus _Christ_ lady. Fuck.” 

The ‘ow’ doesn’t come from her this time, and the grabby-hands let go so fast she stumbles forward, but a new hand catches her wrist and pulls her sideways, so then she stumbles sideways, then feels hands at her waist, steadying her. 

In front of her, Belt Buckle is rubbing the back of one foot against his calf like a six-ten toddler who needs to pee, glaring. 

“Take a hint and fuck off before I step on the other one.” 

Cassie looks up into Miranda’s face. “Oh, hi Miranda,” she slurs, wrapping her arms around Miranda’s neck instead because she is at the point of drunk where someone else's shoulders are a critical part of her center of gravity. She remembers she’s supposed to be annoyed at Miranda, but doesn’t really remember why, and she’s _mighty_ glad to see her right now. “Did you just rescue me from Mr. Grabby?” 

Miranda looks exasperated, and begins steering them backwards towards the booths, off the dance floor. “I am trying to save myself from having to be here any longer,” she says, just loud enough to be heard over the music. 

Cassie bats her lashes. “Buy me a drink and I might not wander off with another strange man…” 

Miranda squints at her, then sighs, depositing her in the booth seat. Cassie’s hand slides down her arm as she levels towards the cushion, then pauses at her elbow, running it back up again. “Jesus, you’re strong,” she whispers, then giggles. “How much spin does it take to get me a pair of these?” 

Miranda’s lips twitch. “Do you want to keep grabbing my bicep or do you want your _last_ drink.” 

“Both,” she answers breathlessly. 

“Can’t do both,” Miranda says, then slides in beside her with a sigh. “And I really don’t think you need that drink after all.” 

Cassie laughs again, leaning her head down to butt against Miranda’s shoulder. “Probably not.” She stares up at her from slightly upside-down, still idly trailing her fingers up and down the wiry, corded lines of muscle she can feel through the thin fabric of Miranda’s sleeve, then down to the same in her forearm. Bare skin, that bit; sleeve rolled up at her elbow. She lets her hand fall away, spotting a new distraction. “You have really pretty hair.” She reaches up to twirl the end of the bit dangling just above her nose around the tip of her pinky finger. 

“So you’re this kind of party girl, ay? The cuddly, touchy, 'Ooh, pretty, can I feel your hair?’ kind?” Her imitation of Cassie’s voice has a shockingly good American accent, though it’s not exactly a flattering tone. 

Cassie doesn’t fixate on that, though. Instead, she frowns and thinks about the words, but it’s hard to think with the music bubbling her in like this, and with Miranda’s big, blue eyes staring down at her more intensely than any of the LEDs. “Maybe? Not really, no." Cassie has met a lot of that kind of party girl, mostly in bathrooms where they usually compliment her lip gloss even if her hair is stuck in it. "I’m more the— the ‘flirt with Mr. Grabby till he buys me enough drinks I don’t care if he’s _too_ grabby’ kind of party girl.” She starts letting the hair curled around her finger unwind. “It was kind of really nice, though. Getting stolen away. And...” Her hand slips back down from toying with Miranda’s hair to feel her skin again, because that felt really nice, and warm in a way she didn’t think about Miranda before — all black coats and cold leather gloves and icy eyes — 

She tries to sit up, because all at once, everything is vertigo, and she can sense something waiting at the edges of that vertigo, the shift of the light that says if she’s not careful, she’ll wander off into her head to talk to Alex again, and right now, she doesn’t much know what she wants, but she knows it’s not that. “I’m gonna get that drink,” she says instead, sitting up and trying to scooch the full circle around to get off the other side of the bench. 

She’s _really_ dizzy, she realizes when she goes to stand up. The circle-scooching, the head-tipped-back-for-a-whole-conversation, the several, several, _very_ strong drinks before that… 

“That’d be a little fucked up, wouldn’t it,” Miranda murmurs, catching her arms, pulling her back against her without warning, and Cassie is deeply, deeply disoriented, but glad it’s stopping her from maybe tipping over. “I basically kidnapped you.” Her breath is warm and close against the shell of Cassie’s ear, and she shivers with every inch of her skin, then giggles as the words make their way through the drunk and the… something. 

“You didn’t kidnap me, silly. I said Montreal? Here I Come!” 

And that faint reminder of adventure kicks decisive-drunk Cassie into full gear. She spins around in Miranda’s arms, deceptively steady, and takes her by both hands. “Let's get out of here.” 

“What?” Miranda asks, and Cassie has ten seconds of distraction at how much of her usually pale eyes are currently eaten up by her dark, wide pupils, but she shakes herself because she knows what she wants. 

“There’s a falafel truck outside and I saw on my way in that it’s open twenty-four hours. Come _on_.” 

* * *

By morning, not even staring at the paper wrapper from the falafel truck lying on the floor beside her bed will bring back a single memory from later in the night than flirting with Mr. Grabby. Cassie really hopes she didn’t sleep with him. He was _not_ that hot. 

Well, this is the townhouse, and she’s the only one in her bed, so that’s a good sign?

She picks up the trash and wanders down the stairs with heavy feet. 

_“Breathing is essential in living a centered life.”_

There’s a door open on the other end of the kitchen — top-load washer, dryer, and a stereo set on a shelf above both. A recording is playing. 

“What the hell…?” she asks blearily. 

Miranda looks up at her. When Cassie walked in, she was sitting at the kitchen table with a cup of coffee in her hands and her eyes closed, and she doesn’t look super pleased at the interruption. 

“Honestly do not know how you get up at a reasonable hour after last night, but… why not.” She rolls her neck in a slow, gathering gesture, then looks up at Cassie through the resulting mis-swept lock of her hair. “Well, I’ve always found when you’re going to live with someone, it’s best to get the quirks out in the open early. Otherwise, you’ll just piss each other off thinking of all the things you aren’t doing because you don’t want the company to know. Seeing as I already know your embarrassing habits, I’ll kindly ask you to say fuck all about mine.” 

Cassie stares another minute, not quite believing Miranda is actually just... sitting here... listening to... but— _“We can forget to be present and just experience this moment, this now…”_ — yup, definitely happening and... no. She can’t handle self-help this early. Not with this headache. 

"I'm gonna just... leave you to your..." She waves her hand in the air. 

She walks right back upstairs, into her bedroom, and closes the door. 


	6. Chapter 6

Hunger chases her back downstairs. There are cereal boxes on top of the fridge that weren’t there yesterday, but the only thing inside of it is milk. It’s a completely random brand selection, like what you’d get if you ran your hand along the waist-level shelf and just bought the first five boxes you knocked off into your cart. Cassie’s up on tip-toe tugging down the Honey Bunches of Oats when Miranda’s voice creeps over her shoulder. 

“Let’s talk about last night.” 

Her whole body cringes. She lets out a groan, resting her forehead against the freezer. Then, reluctantly, she turns around, hiding her face behind the box. “One condition? You do all the talking.” She peers over the top. “How much of a little shit was I?” 

Cassie still has pajama pants on, and Miranda looks fully and professionally dressed for a day of hiding in a dark alley waiting to kill someone. Her lips twitch. “You can be a bit of a little shit, can’t you.” 

“That’s the Cassie special,” she toasts with the box. “Did you buy anything besides cereal?” 

“I’m sorry, do I look like a person who does a lot of cooking?” 

Cassie lets out a tiny laugh through her nose. “Okay, fair, no. And… same.” 

“Here. Want cocoa?” Miranda asks, turning to the counter. 

Cassie blinks in surprise at the red and yellow mugs that have appeared in her hands, looking entirely out of place with the ever-sharp black-on-black she’s wearing. 

“I did buy a few more things than cereal, and I made double when I heard you sounding alive up there again. It's way too late for coffee.” 

“Thanks.” She takes the closer mug, yellow, and sets it on the table, then goes back to find the right cabinet for a bowl. “I’m serious, though. If you need to lecture me for something that went down at that bar you’re going to have to remind me before you scold me. So far I’ve added up ‘probably didn’t sleep with tall guy’ and ‘might have dragged you to late night falafel.’” She pauses. “God, this is good.” A cocoa sip mid-sentence has revealed the ridiculously deluxe, probably Ghirardelli kind, perfect for wrapping some big-sleeved-sweatered hands around and staring out into the snow. It would be even better with some peppermint schnapps, but Miranda is between her and the liquor cabinet, so she’ll survive without. For now.

“Well, you’re two for two so far. But believe it or not, I don’t really give a damn about what happened at the bar. I meant why the hell you wandered off in the first place. Didn’t I tell you to stay put?”

“No.” Pre-bar, her memory is just fine. “No, you told me not to do anything stupid. I thought you meant like… Don’t-call-Annie stupid. Not like, don’t-talk-to-strangers stupid. I was just trying to have a normal day. Sorry I can’t read your mind.” Cassie hears her words coming faster, more than a little defensive. 

Miranda’s eyebrows are all the way up. “I do have some questions about your definition of a normal day, but we can come back to that. You can’t just go wandering around the city. I don’t know it’s safe yet.” 

“I mean, okay. I just thought… we stayed at a normal hotel. You wouldn’t let me get a disguise at the airport. It doesn’t exactly seem like we’re lying low.” 

Miranda sits across from her with a sigh. The slow sip she takes from her mug gives Cassie the distinct impression that the cocoa is the only thing preventing her impatience from reaching across the table and shaking Cassie by the shoulders and telling her what an idiot she was. She sets it down again. 

“Remember your little scarf in Bangkok? The one that showed up within a day in a half dozen international papers? That didn’t help you hide, because that’s not how this works. Have I been walking around with a scarf over my head? No. But were you able to get a mark on me after you nearly took out my eye throwing your shoe at me on the train? Also no, because I had people who make sure when I show up on camera, I disappear just as quickly. I don’t have all of that at my disposal right now, but Sarah’s passports are the next best thing. They come with… certain services, shall we say. No one looking will ever find footage of you and I in the airport yesterday.” 

Cassie blinks about fifteen times. “That’s kind of terrifying. You hear yourself when you talk about really scary things like they’re totally normal, right? And also, just to keep the record straight, I did not throw my shoe at you. I kicked it.” 

“Well you have a very special relationship with semantics don’t you.” 

Cassie just takes another gulp of cocoa, keeping narrowed eyes on Miranda, waiting for more words. 

“The point is… getting away, fast, takes enough human intervention that, while it was the best possible option given the circumstances, there are always a few different threads someone following us could pull. The first days are the riskiest, though if you ask me in a week I’ll tell you the next days are even worse, because that’s when you might actually let your guard down. If someone followed us here? Last night? The only thing that kept you alive was that they thought you were trying to lure them out early, because no one would be _that insane_ —” 

What started off as a rather cool, collected PSA just descended into an angry hiss, and Cassie holds her mug very, very close to her chest. 

“—as to go out and get blind drunk on your first night on the run.” 

Ok, so she’s feeling pretty thoroughly chastised right about now. “Technically, this was the second night?” she tries, shooting for innocent and apologetic but mostly just coming out squeaky. “Shit, Miranda, I just… I really wasn’t thinking,” she admits. 

“Yes, that much was obvious.” 

“But I— “ She sets down the mug, but her hands are shaky without something to hold, so she ends up bracing them on her knees under the table. “I couldn’t just… Sit here. I don’t do well with…” Searching for words that aren’t as awkward as _having nothing to do but talk to the dead guy in my head_ or as exposing as _being alone_ , she comes up with something she’s pretty sure a second grade teacher once wrote on her report card. “...unstructured time.” 

“I’m not asking you to sit in a corner, Cassie, for Christ’s sake. I’m just asking you to be safe.” 

“So teach me how to be safe,” she blurts out. 

Miranda doesn’t blink. “Alright.” 

Cassie perks up. “Wait, really?” 

“Well, yeah. Sure. We both want the same thing here, don’t we?” 

“To not get killed by your boss’s creepy assassin.” 

“That too.” 

“Wait, what were you going to say?” 

“Nevermind.” 

“No, not nevermind, now-mind.” 

“Do you want some staying-alive advice or don’t you?” 

Cassie shuts up. She nods her head up and down twice. Miranda’s lips creep towards a smile, then she’s all business again. 

“Good. Lesson one? You were right about one thing — there are worse decisions than grabbing one too many drinks at... Pow Pow.” 

The way Miranda drags out the name of the bar like dirty laundry has Cassie suddenly fighting a laugh. She’s now been here enough times that she recognizes a particular kind of relief that comes from getting out of Miranda’s immediate line of fire, and it feels a _little_ bit like hysteria, but like… an improvement on most of the hysteria she’s felt in the last few weeks. She struggles to keep her face composed, attentive.

_“Do not_ try to contact your lawyer friend, or your brother, or anyone else you’ve been panicking about in the last forty-eight hours. I’m going to give you this—” She pulls out a phone from somewhere under the table, dangling it between two fingers right over Cassie’s last inch of cocoa. “—but it is not an invitation to reach out to anyone you know. Doesn’t matter if it’s your therapist’s birthday or if you think it’d be smart to let your parents know you’re just taking some time for yourself, need some space, don’t come ‘round worrying. All of that: bad. The number one purpose of this phone is so I can reach you, and you can reach me, so I don’t have to stalk through seven bars to find you. Ever. Again.” 

Miranda has the scary eyes on. Cassie nods once, firmly. “Got it.” She tries to take the phone, but Miranda tugs it back towards her. 

“I’m serious. No one. Do you understand? Don’t even go looking. You might not like what you find if you… search for people from your old life. Stalk Facebook, Twitter, look for news. People get hurt. People die. When you’re least expecting it, you’ll find out, and then you’ll be tempted to say just that one nice thing, but if you do, that’ll be the last nice thing you ever get to say to them. Got that?” 

Her voice is softer, now. Serious in a way that Cassie can’t help but feel is more than professional. Like maybe Miranda has been where they are now, before, and this was a mistake she made. And maybe she’s reading into it, but it’s that hint of real care that makes her say it. “You don’t have to worry about me calling or internet stalking my family, okay? Parents are dead. Davey already got my obviously not ideal last phone call, and you heard all thirty seconds of it. At this point, Annie wouldn’t even answer if I tried. And that’s it. No other family to care.” 

There’s a flicker of something across Miranda’s face, and Cassie almost expects some kind of condolences, but of course not. This is Miranda Croft. All that comes out is, “Glad to hear it.” 

Then the phone is in her hand. 

Cassie ignores the morbid positivity and opens it eagerly, amazed at how comforting it is to have a hunk of tech in her face after two days without. There’s no lock set, nothing but pre-installed apps, and just one contact. Renee Walsh. 

“Now, if I say I have to go out and you need to stay put, are you going to listen?” 

Cassie frowns, looking back up at her. “You could take me with you.” 

Miranda’s eyes flick towards the clock, then pointedly down to Cassie’s tie-string PJs. To her credit, it almost seems like she’s weighing her options for, oh, an entire second there, but in the end she shakes her head. “Not today. I have an errand, and it’s important. Use some of this… unstructured time you hate so much and make that phone look a little more like it’s owned by a human being until I’m back, and I’ll bring you with me tomorrow.” 

“You swear? Where are you going?” 

“To handle something.” Miranda says. 

Then she gets up and leaves. 

— 

Within an hour, Cassie really wishes she had never gotten on a plane to Montreal with Miranda. Part of her knows she would have much, much bigger problems than gnawing boredom and paranoia if she stayed in New York, but considering how much of her has been consumed by gnawing boredom and paranoia over the course of the first few days in townhouse hidey-hole personal hell, the part of her left to feel worried about things like dying at the hands of hired killers is very, very small. 

Alex paces around behind her like a zoo animal, asking why she’s sitting in the corner, and won’t she come sit beside him on the couch, at least? But this is not a couch-sitting kind of mental place. It’s a corner-sitting, screen-staring, Alex-ignoring one where she needs one-hundred-percent of her mental focus on ridiculous things like the fact that Facebook requires proof of identity to make an account— it _definitely_ didn’t ask for that back in 2006 — and Miranda didn’t give her any advice about how good Canadian fake IDs are if you stick them into the social media machine so maybe Twitter is the way to go, but maybe lunch first, and DoorDash is a totally normal human thing to put on her phone, but does Montreal even have DoorDash? Score: it does, and her phone is hooked up with some kind of payment she can only assume Miranda is okay with her using because she gave her the phone in the first place, so now she gets to have pad thai in the corner with her while she hyperfixates on what kind of real human has a Twitter and no Facebook. Like, seriously. Who does that? Maybe Google knows. And then she’s reading an article about why more and more people are deleting their Facebooks in the information mining age and maybe it’s overkill but actually that seems like a great way to start Sandra’s Twitter, like— _Facebook? #evil. Finally took the plunge and deleted mine for good. here for a fresh start!_

Then she has a big, long debate with herself about whether going outside to stage a pic-from-behind to real things up some more would be violating the stay put order. 

“Definitely violating the stay put order.” 

“Ugh.” She spins around. At some point, her mental corner has sprouted an office chair. Must be all the serious business of fake-Twitter-making. It's really, really time for a break, and if she can't go outside... “You could take a picture of me,” she says, batting her eyelashes at Alex. 

“Yeah, ‘cause that’ll be really useful for you.” 

“Who said I meant a Twitter picture,” she adds, slinking up out of the chair and over to him. 

“Are you... asking me to do a sexy photoshoot? In your head?” 

Cassie pouts. “It’d be more sexy if you just pulled out a camera like you did for the stakeout and stopped being Mr. Skeptical.” 

“I just…” He frowns as she wraps her arms around his neck. “...kinda don’t get the sense that’s what I’m here for.” 

She runs her fingers through his hair, feeling a momentary tug of reality at the thought she’s… not really sure she remembers this about him. Whether his hair was thick or thin, soft all over or a little bristly at the nape of his neck. “Just… distract me?” she says. “Please? I really want her to not be mad at me tomorrow, but if you don’t cooperate I will absolutely go looking for a stranger to take a picture of me in the park.” 

“Cassie, I’m not—” 

She kisses him. 

Kissing is prime distraction real estate. She expects to get swept up in it, her little tragic romance, half memory, half might-have-been. For days now he has been nothing if not an excellent, inconvenient distraction stealing minutes and even hours of her life when she can least afford to lose them and right now, all she wants is to kill time until annoyingly cryptic Miranda walks back through that door and can’t be pissed at her because but Cassie is right where she left her and did exactly what she told her to but… Alex… 

Isn’t kissing her back. Like, at all. 

So she stops. 

He’s just standing there. Still staring at her. 

“What?” she asks.

“I actually don’t know if I can be the one to tell you you were not thinking about me at all just then.” 

Cassie stares dumbly at him. “Was too.”

“I mean I’d like to agree with you. That would be a lot nicer for me. As, you know, the dead guy in your head who was actually the one getting kissed and all, I’m not going to argue too much, but also, seems like I just straight up can’t kiss you back when you aren’t thinking about kissing me, because… you know…” He waves his hand around. “...not real…” 

“Shut up,” Cassie says, feeling her breathing starting to pick up into something a little panicky. “Try again.” 

“How about you try again, and this time skip the part where you think about how Miranda might smile at you if she thinks you did a good job making your fake Twitter.” 

“That’s not a thing!” Cassie says. “At all!” And— 

Oh, shit. She said that out loud out loud, and it’s actually dark outside, and she’s still in the kitchen, in pajamas, and Miranda is hanging up her coat with her cheeks flushed from the cold and hair a little messy from the wind and staring at her. 

“What’s not a thing?” 

And, uh, how exactly does she answer that in a way that isn’t ‘Hi Miranda, welcome home. Thinking about you was ruining my imaginary make-out session with dead Alex?’

“Nothing?”

Oh yeah. That’s how, for sure. 

Better just… sidle on up the stairs with a weird smile to really lock that in.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Cassie is absolutely that one friend in quarantine who a. is wildly paranoid about catching it like she lysols her wine.com order before bringing it inside and b. is trying her damn best to follow all the rules like she really is she's totally here for safety but c. is so completely stir-crazy she will drag the entire squad out for patio pizza even when it’s negative thirteen degrees outside.


	7. Chapter 7

True to her word, Miranda looks up when Cassie comes downstairs the next morning (wearing real human pants, thank you very much) and says, “Ready to go?” 

“So, so ready.” 

Problem is, they don’t really go anywhere. It’s Montreal: Day One all over again, but this time with company. Like, they go get _brunch_. Cassie keeps waiting for the other shoe to drop, for Miranda to tell her why they’re at this particular cafe and where she was yesterday and the day before that and what Cassie should be paying attention to out here to know if they’re being followed by a murderous psychopath but all Miranda does is order a crepe, ask what she got up to yesterday, give her fake Twitter a nod, and suggest she should add a LinkedIn. You know. “In case you have to trick anyone who works in the U.S. government.” 

“Why would I have to...” 

Cassie decides not to finish the question, because everything Miranda has said all meal has been vague and unsatisfying, and at least messing around on her phone again gives her a break from the unrelenting vagueness and dissatisfaction of the rest. 

After, Miranda has the nerve to walk them right back to the townhouse. Cassie stops outside, staring at her as she stalks up the steps. 

“Um, excuse me?” 

Miranda turns back, hand on hip. “Yes?” 

“What the fuck was that.” 

Miranda’s eyes narrow. “Brunch.” 

“Uh, yes. And?” 

“And?” 

“What’s the rest? You said you’d take me with you.” 

“And I did,” she says, forcibly casual, then opens the door with a hand behind her back. “Are you coming in?” 

“No, no, you know what? I don’t think I am. You owe me more than a fucking _brunch_ after—” 

“—Can we please do this inside?” 

The “please” stops her. She glances at the neighbor-houses. So far, she hasn’t seen any sign of life in either one, but there must be something — the shrubs are neat, the tiny strips of grass just barely poke through the inch of snow; trimmed. 

“Fine.” 

She storms past Miranda and unloads her coat and bag over the back of that stupid green couch, then spins on her heel to point a finger at her. 

Miranda is much closer than she thought she’d be, so her spin ends up jabbing her in the shoulder, hard. One eyebrow goes up. Cassie trips over her tongue for two seconds, then decides to double down, keeping her finger right where it is. “You’re up to something. I don’t know what it is, and you don’t have to, like, reveal all your deep dark secrets to me, but come on. I can do more than make a fucking LinkedIn. That’s… baby stuff. And sure, I’m an amature. I’m not ready to… commit grand larceny or whatever. Not even totally sure I know what that is. But I can do more than lunch. You know. Like I did back in that garage. Give me _something_ here. Like… little league? What’s the little league of—” She stops jabbing so she can gesture vaguely at, well, Miranda. “—this.” 

“That would be dead.” Miranda catches her hand in midair and presses it down against the back of the couch. “Do you have any idea what you’re asking for? What is it you thought we’d be doing, hm? We have identities. We don’t need more. You’ve realized by now most of my work is not money drops.” 

Cassie scrambles. “Maybe… getting rid of my old phone? Discreetly finding out what’s happening in Alex’s case? Anything! Anything. Literally whatever errand it was you had to run? I’m there.” 

“When I said errands, I meant errands, Cassie. I got groceries and a first aid kit.” 

“You bought cereal, cocoa, and a box of bandaids bigger than my _head_.” 

“Yep, the basics.” 

“That’s… That’s not… Well, what about yesterday?” 

“I—” She frowns. Shakes her head. Finally lets go of her grip on Cassie’s hand. “It’s sweet that you want to help, but there’s nothing else. Not today.” 

“Really? That’s what you’re gonna give me?” 

“Really.” 

“Fine. If you’re going to patronize me, then I’m going out on my own.” 

“Cassie—” 

“No.” She scoops her coat back up and on. “I’m not staying cooped up in here for another whole afternoon. No way. See you tomorrow.” 

Then she storms out the door. 

By the time it’s dark out, she’s pretty sure she can feel Miranda’s eyes on her at the bar. She elects not to give a fuck. This time, confirmed: the bartender is definitely flirting with her. Seeing as he’s working and all, it definitely can’t go anywhere, but she decides that’s exactly the speed she wants. Friendly, flirty, no follow-through. She even gets his number with her ‘new in town, don’t know anybody yet’ sad-eyes-and-a-smile routine, and makes him promise they’ll be friends if she can’t coax him to break some work rules. 

He does, and somewhere in there she thinks maybe that’s the better idea, anyway. 

The house is dark when she gets back. Silent as a grave. 

* * *

Miranda isn’t there when she gets up. She almost can’t believe it, but the door to the second bedroom is wide open and the sun is streaming in the window and the space is unoccupied. “That complete and total—” 

“What, did you think she’d wait around for you after you threw a tantrum and stormed off to get drunk?” 

Alex isn’t helping. 

“I thought you weren’t talking to me anymore.” 

“You know, of the two of us? I don’t think I’m the one with a choice in that.” 

Cassie humphs, then breathes in deep, then goes to sit with him on the couch, side-by-side. Her hands feel strange in her lap. Like she should be reaching out for him, or at least holding a glass. Maybe a stress ball. “I really don’t know what I thought this was gonna be like,” she admits. “I guess more like… Still trying? I know I… cracked the case, or whatever. I know who killed you now, but that really doesn’t feel much like closure when this Felix is still out there somewhere. And, I mean… what day is it? The FBI definitely knows I didn’t show up for work and fly to Rome, so I’ve gone from probably the number one suspect to the definitely-did-it fugitive-on-the-loose, and I’m just supposed to… not do anything about that?” 

“I think that’s the point of running away.” 

“Yeah, well, it’s not what I want.” 

“You probably should have thought of that before you got on an airplane to another country.” 

“I mean, let's be clear about one thing. I absolutely did think of that. You and I had a whole fucking crying-on-the-floor conversation about that. It’s not _my_ fault that Miranda showed up and… Okay, no, don’t give me that look.” He’s giving her a look. “It is completely and totally my fault that then I just did it anyway. Better? All me. Because I’m a crazy person! And I do crazy things, like get on planes to literally anywhere, any time, with anyone.” 

“You’re not crazy, Cassie. You’re…” 

“Coping in every single fucked up way possible?” She’s gone from raging to sniffly. Anger is the worst.

“Well, yeah.” 

“Thanks. Great pep talk.” 

“You have given me exactly zero chances to pep.” 

“I’m not asking her to babysit me, you know?” 

“That’s— a bit of a one-eighty—” 

“Like, is it too much to ask that she _either_ sit down for long enough that she can tell me what I need to know so she stops panicking when I go off on my own _or_ , if she won’t do that, then let me tag along so I can be helpful?” 

“You do realize it’s probably the same reason why both aren’t working for her.” 

“Yes, Alex, I’m crazy, or coping, not blind. She’s sneaking around doing something… something illegal, and probably dangerous but clearly important so she’s keeping me out of it. And maybe it’s something r-really horrible, and I’m going to wind up dead over it and maybe she just doesn’t want me to die because she still thinks I’m sitting on your mountain of cash but either way… What if it’s about you? How am I supposed to deal with that, huh? This was _my_ situation to deal with.” 

“I don’t think you can call dibs on a murder mystery.” 

“Will you let me have _one thing_ , Alex. Just one?” 

“Okay, fine, fine.” He crosses his hands on his chest. “In my heart, you will always have dibs on my murder mystery.” 

“ _Thank_ you.” 

He gives her his sideways smile, and for a minute, Cassie feels it, that tug behind her ribs that she used to feel, in here with him. She’s not being completely blind about it. It started _after_ Bangkok. She didn’t fall in love with him in a night, but here? She’s made something with him that was good. 

But it’s changing again. 

“Why can’t I just have _this_ ,” she whispers. 

“Maybe exactly what you said. You’re not on my case anymore. You’re gonna have to let me go eventually, and I’m not… I’m not your stakeout buddy. I’m not here to bounce your leads off of. I’m just another dead end.” 

“No,” Cassie pushes back, “No, I do not accept that,” then pushes up off the Bangkok bed and back into reality. But there’s nothing here to grab onto. Just an empty doorway and a bed she stopped sitting on that looks like no one slept there at all and no chance of this day being any different than the last. 

* * *

The weekday crowd at this place where she has chosen to become a regular is sparser and weirder, but there’s live music, so there’s that going for her. She chats up a guy named Mikey. She has… literally no idea what they’ve talked about, but she got his name, so that’s another thing going for her. 

Her eyes flick constantly towards the door. Somewhere in the back of her brain, Alex is trying to chase her down and yelling after her that she should really stop coming to the same fucking bar if she doesn’t want Miranda to find her. And she doesn’t. Want Miranda to find her. Because Miranda is a ghost, and she already has one of those. One ghost is enough. 

One shot is not. 

She does… several more, and turns towards the head-bangy mini-crowd clustered around the stage. “Let’s dance!” she calls vaguely in the direction of her man-of-the-evening, then shimmies into the crowd, one hand above her head, the other reaching back behind her to make sure he can follow her in. 

No one grabs her hand.

“Mikey?” She spins around in half a circle, stops to regain her balance, then completes the turn on her heel, rocking backward, staring at the blur of lights and faces around her, none of them with her, none of them him. Did… Was he even still there, beside her, at the bar? Would she even recognize him? He had… He had a beanie on. It was… some color. Definitely a color. Oh my god. He actually walked away from her. He got up and walked away and she— she didn’t even notice— 

These lights are way too close. The music is too loud, the guitar just a constant battering of groans and squeals and groans again. She can’t hear herself breathing — is she breathing? 

She stumbles out the back door between the restrooms and gulps in the freezing air, hands on her knees. 

“Oh hey.” 

Slowly, she turns her head sideways, trying to force a breath in through her nose instead, sure she looks like a crazy person that absolutely no one wants to be talking to right now. 

It’s the bartender, her one and only friend “the bartender” whose name she can’t even remember, clearly on a break, cigarette between his lips, hands in his pockets. 

Okay. Inhale. “Hey.” Exhale. 

On the inhale, she realizes it’s not a cigarette. That’s a joint. He holds it out to her. 

“Not my poison of choice,” she says, but takes it anyway. The smell always makes her feel a little queasy, but you can’t live in New York as long as she has without sucking it up and getting used to it, and with any luck, it’ll at least help the panic. She breathes in. Holds. Out. “I was gonna say… you can do this here? But it’s all legal, isn’t it.” 

She sounds… normal-ish. Normal-adjacent. Normal like someone you don’t just silently abandon at the bar. Hopefully. 

He takes it back after her drag. “Yup. Not that I should really be smoking on the clock, but management is so woo-woo and also never here. I might as well own the place.” 

He holds it out again, but Cassie already feels the wavey-light headrush from her one hit, so she shakes her head. “I’m good, thanks.” She closes her eyes and tips her head back for a minute, lets it settle over her, feeling the cold on her nose getting heavier and heavier, like balancing a paperweight. When she looks up, flickers of color on the opposite alley wall catch her eye. 

“You have a board out here?” 

“Hm? Oh yeah. It used to be in that hallway,” he thumbs over his shoulder towards the door, “but there wasn’t a single night when the line for the ladies room didn’t knock it off the wall, so we stuck it out here. Now it gets rained on, but I don’t have to clean it up.” 

Cassie snorts, stepping closer, finding the wavey ink smears running down the older, illegible flyers completely mesmerizing. Even the readable stuff on top is a little wiggly for her right now. Missing dog poster. Home-brew class. The bar is hiring - interesting choice, advertising to their own stoned alley-goers, but who’s she to judge. Private French tutor, grades K through 6. Hot yoga. “Ooooh, it would be so good to have a spin class again.” 

“Not my scene.” 

She turns around, leaning back against the wall. “Did I say that out loud?” 

He laughs with her, a gruff, warm sound, and she wonders for a second if she should really stick to her ‘friends’ decision about him or if this is it, the moment she’s been waiting for. When he joins her by the board, she thinks about kissing him, but then he starts pointing out the weird stuff getting advertised— “Every _single_ sex club in Montreal has a fake French name. Like, we speak French, here? You can just use… real French? Instead you get the fucking Source du Sexe” —and she’s laughing and slowly tearing tabs off of things she can’t read and _possibly_ asking him to promise her he’s not here to murder her in a dark alley and then before she knows it, his break is up, and he’s waving in the doorway, and here she still is. 

Standing in the alley. 

Not murdered. Crossfaded. Alone. 

The thought of going back in makes her throat spasm. Time to walk home. 

* * *

Miranda isn’t back in the morning. Cassie is… officially worried. She sucks up the grudge and tries to call her. No answer. She sits on the couch, staring at the door. She makes herself cocoa. She keeps checking the peephole. Another call attempt, and there’s no voicemail set up, so she can only say her “Where the fuck are you?” rant out loud, to herself, in the living room. She makes herself more cocoa, and adds the schnapps. 

Where the hell is she? 

After three cocoas and thirteen phone calls, she has the brilliant idea to ask whether anyone at the bar has seen her. Okay, so it’s not brilliant, but it’s not purely selfish either. There are only two possible groups of people in this entire city that she knows who might know Miranda even exists and she’s more likely to run into repeat customers at a bar than at eight pm at a place they went for a nice noon brunch. 

No luck. 

Two drinks, and a guy she thinks she might have actually seen that night convinces her she should draw Miranda— “Renee”—on a napkin, to make sure he knows who she’s talking about. 

It’s… it’s a really, really bad napkin drawing. She clearly needs him to buy her a drink so she can put it down on Miranda’s napkin-pen face and make it stop staring at her. 

By the time she runs out of reasons for one-more-drink’s and people to wave a damp napkin in front of, it is indescribably late, and she is indescribably drunk. Like, follow-two-twenty-somethings-to-an-abandoned-parking-lot-to-see-feral-kittens drunk. The kittens are really, really cute, even if they won’t get anywhere near her or her two new friends no matter how much crouching down and cooing they do. The parking lot, on the other hand? Super creepy. Worse because she doesn’t notice that it’s creepy till the human friends are gone, and she’s alone watching eight tiny four-legged figures with glowy eyes running up and down a set of decomposing wooden stairs leading nowhere. Seriously nowhere. Middle of the lot, leaning on a lightpost, not a door or a wall or a building they could possibly go with in sight.

A sound like kicked glass clatters in a darker corner of the asphalt. 

This… might be the other side of that _stupid_ stupid line she was trying really hard not to cross. 

She fast-walks out of the lot and hightails it down the sidewalk, hands deep in her coat pockets, constantly looking over her shoulder right up until the townhouse is in sight and… It hits her. She knows before she gets there and starts checking the only other pockets she has. Her keys are in the kitchen. Her keys are in the kitchen because she was playing with the fob while she was drinking her cocoa while it was still virgin cocoa and by the time she was several less-than-virgin cocoas in she wasn’t _thinking_ about her _fucking keys_. 

She has a moment of hope. She forgot her keys, so she didn’t do the deadbolt. But it doesn’t matter — the lower lock is just a standard door lock — lockable from the inside before you walk out. Fuck. See this? This is why having a hide-a-key over her apartment door is _not_ a safety risk, it’s genius. 

Where’s Max and his “I break into computers, not homes” lock-pick kit when you need him? 

She pulls out her phone. It’s alive — barely, after that many unanswered Miranda-calls — but who else can she call? Are you allowed to get a professional to break you in to your own house when it’s not your house, and no one is supposed to know you live there? 

“Well shit!” she says, light as can be, and then she’s laughing, and pacing up and down the walkway until she’s laughing even harder, fully across the line of hysteria. 

It takes her lungs starting to ache to stop her. 

She sits down on the stoop. Chews on her lip. Eventually, leans back against the door, hunched in on their prickly welcome mat she never noticed before, staring out at the street, feeling cold and miserable and drunk and completely fucking alone in a way she hasn’t been alone since she— since Davey— Since never, never a day in her life and… with her coat wrapped around her and a little bit of heat escaping out under the door… kinda sleepy…? And if she closes her eyes… at least she won’t start… 

* * *

“Alright. C’mon. You can’t sleep out here.” 

A finger, poking her in the shoulder, hard. She looks up, blinking blearily against the dim streetlights haloing a dark shadow.

“Wha— Oh my god.” She’s up faster than any part of her body wants to be moving, and swaying, and staring, and there’s a small chance she’s bracing her hands against the arms of a total stranger but it doesn’t matter if it’s dark and she’s drunk and she’s drowsy— she’d know that voice anywhere. “Miranda?”

Cassie flings her arms around Miranda’s neck. “You came back! Holy shit I missed you. Also I needed your keys, but I did miss you. There is an entire colony of feral cats in a creepy parking lot like two blocks down from here and none of them will be my friend.” Distantly, she can feel Miranda messing with the door behind her back. Light trickles out. “Wait. Why are you bleeding?” 

“Do you like cats?” asks Miranda, calm as can be, as she toes off her boots at the door. Cassie stops clinging to her neck because her neck is _bleeding_. 

“When I’m drunk,” she hedges. She likes all animals. She’s not like, a cat person.

“That’s a yes, then.” 

“You look like one of them got you.” 

“One of who?” Miranda looks up sharply. 

“The cats, Miranda.” 

There’s a moment of stillness, one of Miranda’s feet halfway out of her second boot, then she starts laughing through her nose, and a truly terrifying smirk crosses her lips. “Fuck, I almost wish he were still around to hear you say that.”

She crosses to the kitchen sink and begins washing the blood off the side of her throat. “All that fuss and I might as well’ve gotten in it with an alley cat.” 

“What happened?” she asks, because up close — and she has gotten Very up and close because she is a concerned ( _[sic]_ drunk) friend and when you are a concerned ( _[sic]_ drunk) friend, you have to get very close to whatever you want to emotionally support in case it and you also need physical support and some general leaning on of each other, these are just the rules — the cut is a good deal cleaner and deeper than anything a cat’s claws would’ve made. 

“Knife fi— woooy there, back up a step, hm?” Straightening up from over the sink, her nose has come up barely an inch from Cassie’s. 

Cassie doesn’t budge. She sticks out a finger and runs it down just alongside the cut. “Ouch.” 

Miranda catches hold of her wrist, hard. “Yes, thank you for the observation. You are now between me and the bottle of disinfectant.” 

“I’ll get it!” she offers, then forgets to step away for a minute because Miranda hasn’t let go of her. “Um…” She glances down, and Miranda drops her. Once she does, her words kick her into motion, and she comes back with cotton balls and the bandaid multi-pack for good measure. 

“Thank you very much,” Miranda says quickly, scooping them out of her hands. She drops into a chair at the table, settling in to sterilizing the wound. 

Even though her eyes weigh a brick each, Cassie watches intently. “You’re going to have one really long scar instead of two,” she observes. 

“Hm?” 

“How’d you get the first one anyway.” 

One finger of Miranda’s hand strays from its cotton ball dabbing to tap the center of her throat. “What, this?” 

“Yeah. That.” 

“Oh, that’s from when my boss tried to kill me, and I don’t expect it’ll scar. I did tell you about that, didn’t I?” 

“Oh.” 

“Yep.” 

“Is that normal in your... line of work?” 

“Pretty much, yeah. It is.” 

“Great,” Cassie squeaks. “Please tell me you’re not doing more of it.” 

Miranda looks at her, level, almost disappointed. “Cassie, how do you think we’re going to get on here? We need money.” 

“Is that why you’re sneaking off? And why you won’t bring me with you? You’re just wandering around fighting people with _knives?_ ” 

Miranda shakes her head with a wince. “Believe me, if the other person has a knife out, it wasn’t quite the job I was sent to do.” 

“Am I supposed to find that comforting?” 

Miranda tosses out her cotton ball and reaches for a bandaid, but Cassie catches her hand.

“Hang on, you’ve still got—” She picks up another cotton ball and drops to her knees with a tiny _oof_ , going down a little harder than she meant to because she’s… well... still a little inebriated. “—blood,” she finishes, wetting the cotton in the disinfectant and reaching out to wipe the streak Miranda missed higher up, closer to her ear. 

Miranda is giving her a look Cassie can’t read, but she doesn’t stop her. “You don’t have to worry about me,” she says, calm and low. “I do know how to handle myself.” 

“Uh, yeah, no, I got that,” she agrees instantly, digging out a little tube of Neosporin that’s in with the bandaids. She reaches into the plastic for another cotton ball. The bag shakes around her hand. “Though, to be clear, you can’t just disappear for days and not answer my calls and expect me not to fucking worry.” She keeps missing, the little nozzle vibrating so much she can’t even touch it to the fuzz. “I mean, not even worry, I wasn’t worried. I was furious, I was— I am so, so angry at you—” She lets her head drop for a second, right onto Miranda’s knee as she shoves one hand down against her own thigh so it will _stop shaking_ and finally gets the medicine where it’s supposed to be going. She takes two deep breaths, then looks up again, knowing her eyes are a little glassy, feeling her nose is a little red. “But I meant more like — I can’t keep spending your money on _vodka_ if you’re out there getting stabbed for it.” 

“You know, as much as I’d like to agree you should spend less money on vodka—” When Cassie pushes Miranda’s face with two fingers, she obliges with a small sound of impatience, tilting her chin up, making room for Cassie to spread the antibacterial cream over the scrape with as short, smooth little dabs as she can manage. “—you should do that because you don’t want to die of hypothermia on your own doorstep after all the trouble you and I have gone through to keep you alive, not because you’re pissed at me, or worried about how I’m getting paid.” 

Bandaid, next. She pulls out the biggest one the box has, and it’s just long enough to get the job done. Cassie smoothes it on with her thumbs and index fingers, feeling Miranda’s warmth through the textured edges, then the softness of her skin as she leaves it behind, fingertips gently sliding down the column of her throat, hesitant to totally let go, needing these little anchor-points to convince herself that Miranda is back, mostly in one piece, alive. 

“Besides…” Miranda rolls her neck slowly on her shoulders, forcing Cassie to drop her hands, then shrugs them back with a final flick of her chin to keep her hair out of her eyes. “I missed this.” 

“Getting your _neck sliced open?”_

Miranda laughs, wry but genuine. “No, though that is inevitable now and again. I meant… This part of the work. Where I’m not just carrying a knife because I might meet someone up to no good, no. I mean the part where I’m very much out to find trouble for myself. I thought… I settled into it, you know. The business part of the business. White collar crime with just a wee dash of bloodshed. But I didn’t start there — I started like this.” She reaches up, runs a finger over Cassie’s handiwork on her throat. “One woman for hire. No boss, no hedge funds, no corporations, no off-shore bank accounts. Just me and whoever could afford my services.” 

“Why did you stop?” Miranda’s eyes are sparkling, and Cassie can’t muster up enough anger to even pretend she’s not enthralled by this peek into her past. 

“Believe it or not, I thought it was time for something a bit safer. Ironic, really. I’ve had more people out to get me in the last month than I ever did in my twenties or thirties.” 

“Wow. Sorry. I really made a mess for you, didn’t I?” She’s trying, maybe, for sarcasm, but that’s a slippery thing on the upward trek back to sober, and Cassie’s pretty sure she just sounds like she says. Sorry. 

She kind of is. 

Miranda shakes her head, leaning over to catch Cassie’s chin before she can look away. “I’ve also had more fun. Believe me. And besides.” She lets go. “I did this to myself. Victor told me to leave it be. I could’ve been off in London, caring fuck all about how he dealt with the aftermath of Bangkok.” 

“Wait…” Cassie says slowly, rocking back on her heels, getting enough out of the way that Miranda can stand up. “I thought Victor had you stalking me. You said you were going through my things for work.” 

“Nope,” Miranda says, casual as can be. “It was my fuck-up, so I stuck around, even after several rather pointed messages telling me I’d outstayed my welcome. Congratulations.” She spreads her hands, half showmanship, half shrug. “You got under my skin.” 

As she vanishes up the stairs, Cassie decides she’s just gonna… sit on the kitchen floor... for a little while longer.


	8. Chapter 8

Mornings-after-mistakes fall somewhere on a scale from sand mouth to kitchen sink. The luckiest ones, she wakes up with nothing worse than a tacky tongue and an otherwise good mood, pops out of bed, brushes some life back into her teeth, and smiles her way out the door. On the other end of things, she wakes up like her brain went through the garbage disposal and hasn’t stopped spinning. 

Absolute worst of the worst? Her brain is still  _ on  _ down there, so there are already thoughts bouncing around, squishing and clanking against the pipes before she’s even awake enough to think them. 

Today is a garbage disposal day, and the thought wedged in the disk is money. Miranda, getting sliced up to make it. Alex and his metric ton of it squirreled away somewhere. Miranda, who definitely thinks she has it, and is definitely only keeping her around because of it, and any day now is going to decide it’s not worth it to keep her around since she clearly doesn’t have it after all and in the meantime is out there risking her life to— 

Cassie rolls over with a groan and buries her face in the pillow. It helps the brain squish for fifteen seconds, but she’s awake, and in desperate need of hydration. Garbage disposal day mantra: Get up, get water, and brush your teeth, even if you do the whole thing scowling at yourself.

She drinks down three glasses in the bathroom before she heads to the kitchen for cereal. 

For once, Miranda comes down later than she did. She looks… tired, but ready to go out. She’s wrapped in a skin-tone scarf tucked into the collar of her coat that covers the bandage on her throat. As she moves around the kitchen making coffee, Cassie can’t keep herself from looking. Like maybe if she stares hard enough, she’ll see blood oozing through. 

When Miranda joins her at the table, she tugs a newspaper towards her mug, turning it the right way up to read while it’s still lying flat and folded.

It really hits Cassie how weird this is. Like, if this were any of the other roommate she had before she started making enough to have her own place? This would be totally normal. Not seeing enough of each other to comment on your mutual bad breakfast choices? Check. Seeing too much of each other to actually want to try to be friends? Check. Fighting over things like going out to brunch that seem stupid the minute you leave the same room? Check. Sometimes showing up at the same bar and trying the friends thing anyway? Well, it’s been a few nights since the falafel she can’t remember but… probably check. 

But it’s  _ Miranda _ . She’s playing super-normal-roommates with a woman who kills people. 

Okay, no. Cassie is not doing silent breakfast. The garbage disposal is still rattling around and probably the only way to shut it up is to try and figure out just how close she is to becoming dead weight. Good morning: lets fucking go. 

“How long do we keep doing…” She gestures vaguely in the air between them, waving her hand over her frosted flakes. “...this?” 

Miranda doesn’t look up from the paper. She takes a drink of her coffee. “Hm?” 

Cassie sets her spoon down. It clinks a few too many times to be as casual as she wants to keep this conversation. “Sticking together. You, showing me the ropes. Letting me crash your safe house. Live off your murder money.” 

“Is that what you think this is?” Miranda asks. Her voice is still idle, but her eyes aren’t moving along the words on the paper anymore. 

“I mean, yes? That is what this is? And honestly if I were rating fleeing the country on yelp you’d get a five star ‘fast and easy and exceptional tagging-along-idiot services provided’ review but like. Ta-da. We did it. You’re gonna kick me out soon, right?” 

“I wasn’t planning on it, no.” 

Cassie blinks. She waits for more. She nervously stuffs two bites of cereal in her mouth then regrets it because Miranda isn’t saying anything which means it’s  _ her _ turn again and she doesn’t want to talk with her mouth full, not that she knows what’ll come out, anway. 

“Why the hell not?” comes out more like “Wah th eh nah?” 

Miranda sets her mug down and gives her that look of utter exasperation that Cassie is now, weirdly for sure, obsessed with. “Well your table manners, definitely.” 

Cassie almost snorts out milk. She can feel it in the back of her nose and quickly drinks water to keep from choking. 

“Seriously, though,” she says when her lungs are back in the clear. “Why am I even here? You  _ have _ to be ready to move on by now. I mean, clearly you already are. You’re never here. New life. New job. Old job. Free-from-boss job.” 

Miranda shrugs. “It’s just work, Cassie. It’s nothing to do with you. Besides, yesterday was… unusual. Things will settle in a week or so, and I’ll be back tonight.” 

And before Cassie can get out a “wait” and find a new direction to prod from, she scoops up her keys and heads right on out the door. 

“Well, fuck me.” she says to the empty kitchen, then thumps her head down on the table with a groan. “I can’t live like this.” 

When she looks up again, it’s right into Alex’s eyes. 

“What, like this?” 

He gets out of the way, and Cassie stares numbly at a Bangkok-suite living room wall plastered with her own mugshot on several dozen cartoonish wanted posters. “Oh god.” 

“You were really cozying up to the idea you might have an excuse to leave just then. Needed to give yourself a reminder of what’s waiting for you back home? I have to say, as much as I like having you staring at me from fifty angles at all times, I kinda liked this place better with the original decor.” 

Cassie buries her face in her hands. “You want to rip them down, be my guest.” 

“No, no, I think I’ll keep them. Nice throwback to the time you smashed in a rear windshield with some pink fiberglass hooves. Which, I might remind you, Miranda saw you do. Along with finding you asleep on the front stoop last night. And I am saying this, Cassie, as the nicest possible reminder that, no matter how much you want to show off to Miranda, she’s seen you like this.” He thumbs towards the poster, which Cassie only sees because she’s peeking out between her fingers. “The good news is, that probably means it’ll take more than some less-than-subtle prying over the good morning cereal to scare her off. Or maybe that’s the bad news, and the good news is you’d have to do a lot more than getting a bandaid on straight to prove yourself.” 

“I don’t need you to rub it in.” Cassie grumbles into her hands. “Also, I mean, I couldn’t get her to say it and you are making a strong horse-based argument, but I still think she is  _ this _ close to dumping me in the Saint Lawrence. And who said anything about proving myself?” 

“I could call it something else, but I think you would throw something at me.” 

“Do it.” She glares at him. “I dare you.” 

“You’re going to have to do a lot more than get a bandaid on straight to get the scary-hot murdery lady to—” 

Cassie throws a pillow at him. 

“What did I say?” he asks, all innocence and mock-wounded eyes. 

“Okay, no. For one, no. I— I just want to  _ do _ something. Sure, I might not have known  _ what _ I was doing in New York, but at least I spent basically every waking minute trying to figure out what happened to you. Now? Now I’m just eating cornflakes and being paranoid and slowly going insane.” 

“And you’re starting to make me give myself deja vu every time I say this, but then why run away at all. Miranda looked down her nose at you and gave you a condescending olive branch that she’d let you tag along on her little getaway and you just hopped right to.” 

“No.  _ No. _ I. Made a pragmatic...miscalculation.” 

“Do you not hear the circles you’re talking yourself in? If this was about being pragmatic and staying alive, you wouldn’t be all,  _ Oooh, Miranda, won’t you let me come with you on your secret murder drives? I am fully losing my mind cooped up here, but please don’t kick me out? If I keep getting myself into trouble, will you come rescue me?”  _

“I might actually hate you.” 

Alex shrugs. “Says a lot more about you than me.” 

“Okay, no.” She puts up a hand. Curls in all the fingers. “Listen up.” She opens them again. “I don’t need Miranda, I just need… something.  _ Anything _ that isn’t bashing my head against the wall and pretending I don’t exist and having really, really shitty luck finding one  _ single _ hot Canadian to hook up with.” 

“Uh-huh,” says Alex, all skepticism. “If you’re that bored, you can probably find another mechanical horse.” 

She grimaces, staring at her mugshot. Then, she squints.

“Hooold up.”

She jumps to her feet and walks to the wall so fast Alex has to scramble out of her way, then grabs one peeling corner of a poster and tugs. There’s another poster underneath. 

Cassie lights up. “That’s it! I know  _ exactly _ what I need.” 

* * *

Brandishing the water-smeared flyer she has liberated from the alley corkboard, Cassie plops her elbows down on the bar, hard. “Hire me.” 

Bartender’s eyes come up from where he’s wiping down the taps, slow. “Well if it isn’t Don’t-Murder-Me Sandra in the light of day.” 

“Oh, please, don’t pretend you haven’t seen me in here day drinking.” 

“Is that your application? Professional day-drinker?” 

“No, no, ok. Hear me out. One? You know me, you like me, you know I can be real flirty but dial it back when I have to. That’s like… half your job.” 

“I should probably be insulted, but go on.” 

“Two? Been here, done this before. I didn’t bring you a resume because this was a little spur of the moment and I know I’m gonna have to work on my French but I can promise you I know my way around a bar, and not just from this side. College town, right on the corner of sorority row, total hot spot, and me? I was the one they’d send out when the dudes were getting flash-mobbed, and by flash mobbed I mean harassed, tits-out, as a no-tip protest for being cute but too slow. This oh-so-civilized establishment has  _ nothing _ on Dirty Bubbles.” 

His lips are twitching. 

Good sign? Maybe a good sign? 

“And... that’s your application?” 

Cassie leans in with a smile. “If I say yes, did it work?” 

“Is this how you got your last job?” 

It’s been years since she interviewed with Imperial Atlantic, but the memory is crystal clear. She got all buttoned up in a cute black dress on the obnoxiously chic end of businessy and handed over a neat little resume printed on 32lb, 75% cotton paper and they sat her in a big room with her biggest smile on to talk about her qualifications and why she wanted to be a flight attendant which meant she could gush about how safe Cheryl McAdams made her feel about flying even after she witnessed the 7997 crash as a little girl… 

“Weirdly enough, not even close.” 

He looks like he’s trying not to laugh. 

She thinks about offering to do the works — application, resume, interview, but her knee’s bouncing against the bar and she’s still a little too pumped up from getting the idea in the first place to say anything more serious than, “So, what d’ya say?” 

“Yes.” 

Her leg tenses to a stop. “Wait, what, really?” 

“Listen, I think it’s a terrible idea, but you did kind of sell it, eh? And besides. I would do it just to rib Chris.” 

“Chris?” 

Bartender — god, she has got to get his name — snickers. He holds his hand up several inches higher than the top of his head. “Big guy, yea high?” 

“Oh shit.” Cassie gets a post-blackout flash of a dance floor starts to laugh. “Belt buckle.”

“Ohhhh yeah. He and I went to high school together. He is still incredibly pissed that your bodyguard stepped on him.” 

“My wha— She’s not my— She’s— Well, okay. Whoops. I do  _ not _ remember that.” 

“ _ Mon gars _ had it coming. If he were a tiny bit more of an asshole he’d have gotten himself kicked out, but he mostly just goes home alone. He is going to lose it when he catches you back here, and I, for one, can’t wait to see it.” 

Cassie grins. The yes is finally sinking in now, and happy little bubbles of achievement and  _ something to do _ are rising up behind it. “And I can’t wait to get started.” 

* * *

She gets away with it for an entire week. He wants her working days, mostly — Liam. His name is Liam. And she figures it out just by listening in without having to ask, thank you very much — which is ideal, because then she gets to hang around after work and have fun on the other end of a shift. Even more ideal, Liam is super lazy about the paperwork, super not curious about her past, and totally cool paying cash. He doesn’t even look twice at what she fills out in a mild panic over having zero bank info and an SIN she got off a not-super-real-looking letter in Miranda’s envelope of papers — just tosses it in a back room so “Management can find it later.” 

Fugitive. Dream. Job. 

And, okay, so having unlimited access to vodka and only a Liam who’s  _ way _ worse than she is about sobriety on the clock to stop her from living her best life one hundred percent of the time is kinda dangerous, but honestly? It’s actually… not as urgent like this, when she’s out of the house and chatting with happy strangers and has the total security blanket of the shelves at her back. She’s met and likes the two other guys who fill in around her and Liam and one of them has the most  _ adorable _ four-year-old who calls her Sandy and makes her promise she’ll come meet her new puppy, and how cute is that gonna be? And yeah, she regularly misses other things — the little thrills of a thousand takeoffs, the big thrills of being in a new place every few nights — but she kind of just feels like it’s her state school years again, and she’s cruising by with just-above-failing grades in self care and survival and her Russian Lit seminar, but making decent money, and having a pretty good time. 

Drunk Franglais, on the other hand, she might never get used to. She caught on to “Bonjour-hi” real fast and she remembers  _ enough _ French for the basics, but when it’s mixed up and around with everyday English and coming out five drinks in with no spaces between words, there’s no shortcut. It’s  _ take-the-time-to-do-the-full-mental-translation  _ or serve the wrong drink, so she takes the time. And she  _ is _ getting better. Liam is helping by tossing English at her if she makes a face at his French and “helping” by making sure she knows one hundred percent of the local swears. On average, it’s a shiny, happy kind of week. 

It’s not the Franglais that pops the bubble: it’s seeing Miranda’s car drive by. She’s out before Cassie is in the morning and back before she’s back at night, and it's a three block straight shot walk or drive to get here, so there she is, afternoons or evenings, coming back from… wherever it is she goes. Sometimes, Cassie admits, it’s probably not even Miranda — just any old black hatchback that makes her squeeze the counter hard enough to leave red lines in her palms, but sometimes, the timing is  _ just right  _ and she  _ sees her  _ through both windows and spends the next hour just itching to  _ know _ . What’s happening, out there, in the rest of the city? What’s she up to? It’s something, for sure. If it were nothing, she wouldn’t be so… so  _ vanishy _ about it. She doesn’t know what, she doesn’t know where, she just knows— 

No. Not going to fixate on The Miranda Mystery. She has what she needs.  _ New job, new me.  _

“And here I actually thought you were settling in.” 

One week. She has made it one entire week before Miranda has turned up unannounced in the absolute dead zone between lunch and dinner and is sitting down at her nice clean counter and saying a half dozen words at her in the kind of deadpan that makes her stomach twist with nerves or something at the best of times and those are when she hasn’t also given her yet another tiny heart attack by stealth-bombing her without a hello. 

She manages, through sheer force of biting-the-inside-of-her-cheek-hard-enough-to-bleed, not to jump out of her skin or yell.

“Hi, Mir— Renee. Can I get you something?” She looks up with a smile that’s not big enough to show where she’s still got some cheek between her teeth. 

“You can get me an explanation for what exactly it is you’re doing back there.” 

Cassie shrugs, keeping her customer-service voice on. “Sorry, we don’t serve that.” 

Miranda reaches out and catches her arm with one freezing glove. “I am dead serious. What the fuck is this?” 

She starts shivering, just a little. She can feel Miranda’s anger radiating off of her, a blistering contrast to her icy fingertips, and it’s starting to spark her own. “Well, seeing as I can’t blow the money you’re earning with your one-woman crime spree on vodka, but, guess what: I do, in fact, need vodka sometimes, I got a job.” 

“And you didn’t tell me?” 

“You don’t tell me what you’re up to. Why should I?” 

“Because, for Christ’s sake, Cassie, I’m the one trying to keep you safe.” 

Cassie shakes her hand off. “It’s  _ Sandra _ ,” she says under her breath even though there is exactly one other person here and he’s all the way at the back corner booth. “And I get off in two hours. Can we have this fight then instead?” 

Miranda looks like she’s about to argue, then her face closes. “Fine. But if you aren’t home then, I will come back here, find out who hired you, and kill them myself. Got it?” 

“Jesus, Miranda,” she mutters, actually a little worried for Liam’s near-future safety, but Miranda’s already spun on her heel and left, the door clattering hard behind her. 

* * *

Two hours and ten minutes later, she’s waiting at the kitchen table like a brooding, one-woman family intervention. At least the gloves are off. Cassie finds them very distracting. 

“Seems like you forgot just how fine a line there is between you, here, alive, and me finding you dead in the alley of that shithole you call a bar.” 

“You know, that’s twice now I didn’t even get a ‘hello.’” Her reflexive anger burned out fast on the tail end of her shift, and now she mostly just feels tired. Coat off. Shoes off. She leans back against the counter and closes her eyes for a second, trying to figure out if she has the energy to re-collect some rage. No, nope. She’s running on empty. “Honestly Miranda? I thought you wouldn’t care.” 

“Of course I care!” 

Wow. She sounds genuinely insulted. 

“Really? I’m not trying to be difficult here, it just kinda seemed like you wanted me out of your hair. I mean, we went through all the trouble of making my fake identity into a real enough person that I could actually, I dunno, live in this city like a regular human being? And now I can actually  _ kind of _ carry my weight around here, so... sorry? But also, not sorry that I decided to start my life.” 

“I have to be able to keep an eye on you, Cassandra. That’s non-negotiable. I— I’ll feel better if I know—” 

Okay, so turns out if anything can rile her up a little bit, it’s getting the full name. “Um, okay. Because I’m the one making it hard to keep an eye on me. Leaving without a word, driving off to who knows where at all hours, sometimes not even coming home at night. Yeah. That’s  _ my _ problem.” 

“I am trying extremely hard to—” 

“What, keep me safe? Well, good news! I haven’t died at work yet and they hired me a week ago, so I really don’t see what the big deal is.” 

“What the big deal is? What the— Have you forgotten why we’re all the way out here?” When Cassie flinches at the burst of anger, Miranda visibly gathers herself, pinching the bridge of her nose. “I know I can’t ask you to be cooped up in here all day and all night. I let you go out for your little binges in the afternoons and that was… well, it wasn’t great, but it was okay, because a crowded bar is… not going to be a first choice. I know how Felix works. He stalks his marks. Waits till they’re settled in somewhere, alone. And by the time you were walking back here… all but that one fuck-up of a night at least I could keep an eye on you. But an empty bar, Cassie? In the middle of the day? Do you know how fast I could have hurt you, kidnapped you, killed you? You didn’t even hear me come in. There’s not even a fucking doorbell on the place.” 

“Uh, yeah. It’s a bar, not a thrift store.” 

Miranda just keeps going. “And whatever it is you think I might be capable of, it really is work for me. Felix? Felix is a psychopath.” 

“Mmhmm, like you have said before, like I  _ know _ .” 

“No you don’t. You think you do, but if you did, you’d be a hell of a lot more worried than you’re acting right now so... let me tell you about Felix.” The sudden intensity in Miranda’s voice sends a little chill down her spine. “We may be off his radar, but he is not just going to give up. He has killed women, children—” 

“What kind of messed up people did you work for that—” 

“Victor told me that when Felix was young, everyone at his boys’ school was freaked out because he gutted a bunch of cats, and then _ hung them _ from a  _ tree _ .” 

Cassie’s blood runs cold. 

“Um,” she hears herself say, the faintest squeak of a single syllable through her fish-open mouth. 

No. What? No.

Nonononono. 

There’s no way. It can’t be. It’s. It’s a coincidence. He— There could be a bunch of people with a dead cat tree story. Or it’s a— a small world thing. Same dead cat tree story, two different perspectives. Just… went to the same school. Everyone has a story about that one person in their class you just  _ know _ is going to grow up to be a psychopath like there was Jonathan The Fifth Grader who would try to glue frogs to the blacktop in the summer so they’d “toast” and— 

“Cassie?” 

—and  _ something _ , something rational, something not horrible, smiling and flirting in the bar, home together, naked, perfectly-timed phone calls, floor-naked, mimosas, black leather bar seat, smiley run-away-together, pony ride— 

“ _ Cassie _ .” 

—have to know for sure. Can’t know until you  _ know.  _ Just gotta find out. Some way. Somehow. 

“I know you said you didn’t  _ work _ with him but you don’t… you wouldn’t… have any pictures of Felix, would you?” 

Miranda is giving her the  _ are-you-about-to-lose-it-on-me  _ look. “You are freaking me out enough right now that I’m going to go get something and you’re not allowed to freak out more about it when I get back.” 

She gets up and vanishes upstairs, then comes down a minute later with two phones. “This is my work phone. They can’t find me with it as long as I don’t do anything stupid, and I’m holding on to it for… contingencies. I’ve never met him myself, but I… had a trusted associate who hates him — way more personally than I do — try and find him. See if he was on to us. The good news is, he went on a flight you were supposed to be working before anyone realized you weren’t going to show. That’s half of why I… I was okay with this, with you being a little less careful. He wasn’t on to us then, but there’s been no sign of him since this day. At the time, my contact sent a photo to confirm she’d personally verified his location.” 

None of Miranda’s words sink in. Cassie is barely breathing. Then the screen turns her way, and it’s a weird-angle pic of a several-person security queue at the airport and there’s… something off about the hair… but as soon as she gets past that and locks on to the face, she lets out a tiny whimper of recognition. 

“Cassie, talk to me. Did you see him? Is he in Montreal?” 

“Oh, I saw him, I saw _ all _ of him, I—” Can’t do this. Nope. Not okay. Cabinet. Just gotta reach up behind her head, open the door, grab literally anything glass. “Fuck.” She’s… retreating. Tactically. Into Bangkok, except it’s so much worse than before. Buck— Felix.  _ Felix _ is plastered over the walls on top of her mugshots and she can still feel it in her hand, whatever cold, heavy thing she grabbed from the liquor shelf but at the same time her hands are full of the edges of papers getting under her nails as she reaches out and starts to  _ shred _ anything she can get her hands on, screaming  _ motherfucker psychopath _ while Alex — ever helpful — grunts and rips Felix-Buckley-faces down beside her but Miranda, Miranda is looking at her, Miranda is waiting for her to say something which is asking an awful lot of her right now but she deserves to understand that, “This— This guy that I am  _ seeing _ , back in— in New York, had a lot of sex with me, and then lied to me, and then  _ got on my Rome flight to kill me? _ ” 

“You—” 

There’s a terrible look on Miranda’s face, just a totally unfiltered kind of horror that Cassie absolutely  _ cannot _ deal with right now. “I’m um. I need—” She gets the bottle open with the satisfying crack of a twist-top breaking its little foil beading. “—to do this for a second.” She takes a mouthful and almost spits it out. Ugh. Rum. Not a rum kinda girl.

She takes a second gulp. 

Still gross. 

Third.

Somewhere in there, Miranda decides to start talking to her like she’s sane, not an actively rioting mental paper-shredder two seconds away from either screaming or hyperventilating into the Bacardi. 

“You know… he had many chances to kill you and he didn’t. So there must be a reason.” 

“Oh my god he’s so sick. This is  _ so sick. _ He literally said he wanted to run away with me. Who does that? I should have known, right? Right then and there! That… that there was something wrong with him?” Her taste buds are recovering. Time to kill them again. 

Miranda takes the bottle out of her hands. “Alright, no, none of that. Remember who it is you’re talking to right now?” Her voice is sharp, but it’s real, and it starts to cut through competing realities and all-consuming panic. 

“What?” 

“Who else asked you to run away with them, hm?” 

It takes a second, then she gets the most surreal flash of the airport, a moving walkway, a green-roofed taxi, and a horrible, choked laugh heaves its way out of her lungs. “Oh god.” 

Miranda gives her a grimace of a smile. “That’s right. Breathe, Cassie. You couldn’t have known. Psychopaths can be... very charismatic people. There’s no secret password that tells you if a man is garden variety disturbed or an actual killer. You can’t beat yourself up over it. You might even be able to use it, if he does show. I mean, clearly he’s got a thing for you.” 

It’s… helping. Miranda’s voice. The strained little smile on her very-red lips. Level-headed words. 

“I’m such an idiot,” she still whispers, because she can’t— she can’t stop seeing it, now. Herself, through his eyes. Just some drunk, gullible little mark. “And, oh god, I’m out here making the same mistakes, aren’t I? Just— flirting with random guys in bars, that’s how he— that’s where he met me, or, he probably already knew and he just  _ went there _ to  _ get me _ oh  _ god _ , I have to— I have to quit, don’t I. I can’t just be  _ inviting him _ to  _ stroll on in _ on me closing up one night and— You were right, of course you were right, and I’m just…” Her voice is going up, shrill and mocking and self-recriminating. “... _ lucky _ to be  _ alive! _ ” 

Miranda grabs her face between both hands, silencing her. “No, Cassie. That isn’t what I meant. I—” She sighs, one thumb sliding across her cheekbone. “You are very hard to be angry at.” 

Something about that, about this, makes Cassie’s cheeks heat up. She wonders, in a suddenly still part of her brain, if Miranda can feel it under her hands. 

“You should keep the job. You’re right. You are allowed to start your life here. I have— given you very mixed advice, and that isn’t your fault any more than Felix—” 

Cassie flinches at the name, hard. It comes with a flash of  _ face _ now, a face that loomed over her in a city-dark bedroom, a face whose eyes she remembers more than anything else about the sex because she’s was drunk, every time they did it, and its the things you see that stay with you more than the rest and maybe she should be glad for this sensationless imprint of nothing worse than eyes but all she is is  _ disgusted _ and— 

It’s not his face in front of her, not right now. It’s Miranda. Miranda tucking her hair behind her ear, saying her name, pulling her back. “Cassie. I need you to focus. Hear what I am saying.” 

A memory creeps over her with the gesture, one from Bangkok. She’s at the table with Miranda, and Alex is… not. She didn’t remember this before. All her times peering into that fuzzy past, trying to tweeze any last shreds of memory out of the night, Alex had been with her, but this feels as real as anything she ever gets back after a blackout, and it’s just her and Miranda, and Miranda is leaning close, cupping her cheek, and running a thumb up the skin just beside her mouth.  _ “You’ve got a bit of salt _ ,” she hears in the lighter, happier tone of the evening, and her own answering laughter, bubbling in her ears. That’s right. She’d stolen a sip of some house special Alex had ordered (then didn’t even like), with a sesame oil salt rim. She’s clinging, now, to every detail she can get, because it’s better, so much better, than the new reality she’s doing a really, really bad job coming to terms with. 

“Felix is a terrible person, who did a terrible thing to you.” The hand that brushed her bangs away now cups the back of her neck, cool and reassuring. “If I knew where he was right now, I’d kill him for it. Or bring him here, if you’d rather do it yourself.” 

That shuts up literally every mental processing cell Cassie has. She stares at her. 

Miranda seems to realize that might not be a normal thing to say in this situation. The tips of her fingers curl against Cassie’s cheekbone and spine, right at her hairline. “But I don’t. So the best thing you can do now is… I mean, fuck it, be angry. But be angry at him. Not you. You got away. It’s the biggest ‘fuck you’ you could’ve given him short of a knife in the gut. He’s relentless, like a really bloody Pavlov’s dog, and you’ve ruined it for him. His treat. His fix.” Her lips twitch into a smile bordering on smug. “Also, his reputation. He’s a fuck-up. He had his chance, and instead, he’s gotten sloppy. Victor’s probably got him in a kennel by now.” 

Cassie’s not convinced this should be helping as much as it is, but it’s helping. She wants Miranda to keep telling her things. How much trouble Felix is in. How she should feel, because if it’s up to her, it’s definitely going to be self-loathing. To keep holding her together with her chilly hands, giving her an excuse to remember other things, to feel other things. 

As if reading that need in Cassie’s silence, she gently prompts, “Tell me about the job.” 

“What?” She blinks, slow, like she’s just starting to wake up. 

“What’s it like, did you have a good first week, how the hell’d you get hired in the first place.” 

“Oh. The job. Right.” She flails after the offered distraction. “I might have talked about tits?” 

One of Miranda’s eyebrows takes a climb. “Oh, ay, cause that’ll do it.” 

She lets out a shaky laugh. “It was part of the  _ personal narrative. _ ” 

The other eyebrow joins the first. “Tits.” 

Something about Miranda deadpanning  _ tits _ at her really gets to her. “Yes.” She’s wheeze-speaking at best, kind of choked with the whiplash of the last ten minutes. “Please don’t ask me to explain. If I really laugh right now I  _ might _ throw up, and rum tastes way worse in the other direction. Anyway, it’s good. Really good. I am a kickass bartender. Liam is great. I have no idea if you’d like him because I don’t really get the sense that you like anyone but trust me, he’s great. He won’t sleep with me, but he’s great.” 

“Alright, that is three times now you’ve said that, so I’ll take your word for it.” 

There’s not a lot else to say about the job, so she doesn’t try. “Thank you,” she says instead, quieter. “I know what you’re doing, and it was nice.” 

Miranda moves to wave her off, then finally seems to realize where her hands have been through all of that. She straightens out her fingers, giving Cassie an awkward pat on the cheeks. “Sorry. You’re very—” She moves her hands around an inch from Cassie’s nose, forehead, chin. “—touchable,” she finishes, and there’s a pained look on her face, like she’s almost as frustrated by that vague word as Cassie is suddenly, dizzyingly amused. 

“I just have a touchable face?” There’s a breathless levity to it that’s… not forced, not completely. “Isn’t that an Ani DiFranco song?” 

“Why would I know that,” Miranda snaps, but the smile she’s stifling ruins it. Her head cocks to the side. “Are you going to be okay?” she asks with that rare sincerity Cassie has seen from her a few times, usually when she’s at her worst. 

Slowly, Cassie nods. Takes stock. This is… not her worst. She’s probably not going to sleep tonight, and there’s an angry fire burning low in her gut that’s telling her the sitting around not doing things time is just not going to cut it anymore, not now that she knows this is  _ this fucking personal _ , but it’s a… tomorrow kind of fire, and tonight? 

“Yup. Yeah. I will be.” 

It took some really gross rum and some helpful distraction to get here, but she means it. Not because she’s okay now, or done processing, or not going to go upstairs and scream into a pillow, but because it’s shifted things. Resolve is coming over her, pushing back panic and anger alike. Would she be even better if Miranda killed him? Preferably slowly, and painfully, and repeatedly? Definitely. But seeing as that’s not on the table… she won’t just know this and do nothing. Cassie is not a do-nothing kind of person, and she’s been doing too much nothing lately to let this one go. 

Well, until she figures out the rest, it was pretty nice that Miranda offered. When most friends offer to kill your ex, it tends to have a little less oomph. 

Now that she’s thinking about it like that, a genuine murder offer is... probably not supposed to feel this nice. 

Oh fucking well. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> thank you all so much for all the love this story has been getting, and sorry for the delay! idk, something something this chapter was arguing with me and I had to win before I decided it was right enough to post. Unrelatedly, work is picking up so I probably won't be keeping up the multiple-times-a-week lucky streak I had going before, but definitely still here and all in for the ride.


	9. Chapter 9

Alex tries to talk her out of it. 

On Saturdays, there are four of them who trade off pairs shifts and a fifth who comes in for the rush. For once, she and Liam are tag-teaming the midday, which is totally redundant: it’s  _ painfully _ slow because there’s repaving happening right out front where the best of their street parking should be.

If she took the time to think about it, it would have seemed crazy. But what with the Felix-Buckley revelation, she’s jumpier and on-edgier at work, so Cassie’s primed for a hair-trigger opportunity to do, well, just about anything _. _

When they finally wrap up the slowest six hours on the planet, she walks Liam across the street to his car. She’s half-listening to him rambling about the guy he’s sure the Dennis-and-Touloupe-shift is going to have to throw out later when she spots Miranda driving up towards the crosswalk, about to get stopped at the single-lane corridor between strips of wet concrete, manned by a guy with a hand-held orange stop sign. 

Before she can even finish forming the thought, Alex pops up right behind her shoulder. “Cassie, don’t be stupid.” 

Liam hops back down off the curb to circle around to the driver’s side of his beat-up sedan. 

“What the  _ hell _ are you thinking?” 

Miranda pulls slowly through the green light, stops two seconds later in front of the construction guy, glaring at him. 

“This is never going to work.” 

Liam, door open. 

“And if it does, what do you think you’ll find out anyway?” 

Miranda, car idling. 

“Do you even want to know?” 

Liam, saying goodbye… 

“Cassie, just don’t!” 

Now or never. 

“Hey Liam, can I ask you a huge favor? You live closer to downtown, right?” God, she’s talking fast. 

“I do… What’s up?” 

“Remember my friend who stepped on your friend’s foot the other night...” 

“Not my friend, but of course, yeah, of course I do.” 

“Well, see, I was supposed to catch a ride with her, but her dog made a huge mess in the car and I’m allergic. Any chance you could just… drop me off where she’s going? If it’s not too out of the way?” 

Not bad for short notice. 

He frowns. “Yeah, sure, no problem, and also not a huge favor. Hop in. Where are we going?” 

“Oh, uh… Can you just follow that black car? This is super embarrassing—she gave me the address and I told her I had it but I was so annoyed about the dog thing that I was actually texting a friend about how annoyed I was that she did that when she knows how gross and sneezy it makes me instead of… you know… writing it down? But, uh, we should be there in no time.” 

“Oookay?” 

Poor guy sounds  _ so  _ confused. When he pulls smoothly away from the curb just as Miranda exits the one-lane, she could have leaned right across the console and kissed him. “Thank you,” she says earnestly instead. 

He tails her through the next light and deeper into the city. 

Cassie puts the sun-shield down and tries to sit up as straight as humanly possible behind it while also still looking like a normal human following a normal friend to a normal place on a totally normal Saturday afternoon. The little mirror there is missing it’s flip-top. She keeps making eye contact with herself, and she looks… a little manic, but it could be worse. Her sexy-loose top-bun is still on point since it didn’t go through an afternoon rush, and her big, black scarf looks somehow… chicly appropriate for this probably-suicide mission. Mascara smudge, though. She scrubs at it with her thumb. 

Meanwhile, she can feel Alex staring at her in total judgement. Liam is telling another war story about that same guy, and she’s not sure which one she wants to hear less - an Alex lecture or a Pow Pow tall tale. She wants focus. Did Miranda see her get in the car? Does she know? Is she going to lose them? 

Amazingly, less than ten minutes later, Liam taps her shoulder and asks, “This the place?” 

Cassie stares up at a high rise hotel, then jumps when water splashes on the windshield right in front of her face. Above her, two men in a little metal cage are washing the gleaming glass of some upper-story windows.

“You’d think it’s about to be Construction Holiday with all the city work this week,” he mutters, hitting the wipers. 

In front of her, Miranda is walking into the lobby. 

Holy shit. 

So far so good. 

Cassie can wonder what Construction Holiday is later. 

“Yep! This is it! Thank you  _ soooo _ much. See you tomorrow?” 

“You bet.  _ À demai! _ ” 

* * *

There are so many minutes in the lobby where it could go terribly wrong, and Alex could be totally right, but Cassie is determined to get in at least one  _ “Ha! Told you so!” _ before this goes south so she’s being inhumanly careful: scarf wrapped up over her nose, trailing behind a four-person family as they walk towards the desk, then hopping awkwardly over behind a vertical-window water feature as Miranda crosses the marble, footsteps firm and even. She peers through the glass, squinting really,  _ really _ hard through the thin stream of falling water to try and see the numbers on the little circles that light up above the doors as the car goes up and down. She can’t, so she gives up and just  _ counts _ each time the light moves once Miranda has stepped inside. It’s only after it halts at sixteen that she realizes she has literally no reason to still be hiding behind a geometric waterfall since Miranda… got on the elevator… doesn’t have x-ray vision… 

But more importantly, she dashes over, smashes the up button hard enough her index finger hurts, and starts on her own sixteen-floors-up, told-you-so elevator ride, gloating at Alex all the way. 

Of course, then she’s in a long, three-pronged hall of hotel rooms with no Miranda in sight. 

“Yeah, you really told me so, huh,” Alex needles. 

Okay, he earned that one, but she’s not letting him win. She takes a deep breath and sticks her ear up to the first door. 

After an entire double-sided row of total silence, she’s starting to think this was pretty fucking stupid. Either this floor is spookily empty, has really good soundproofing, or both. She turns the corner and shoves her cheek against the next one in line, only to look up and realize it’s a clearly labeled janitor’s closet. 

As she’s thunking her head against it with a groan, she hears muffled voices. 

For ten seconds, she’s frozen, making sure she didn’t imagine it. No, definitely voices. She picks up the pace. The voices get louder the deeper down into the identical doors she goes. “Warmer, warmer, stop talking to yourself.”  _ Warmer _ , but mouthed this time. 

She reaches the end of the second hallway, room 1623, and it’s unmistakable. 

“Okay, enough of this. I have been here ten minutes. Where the hell is she?” 

Miranda. Absolutely, unmistakably Miranda.

“What, you thought after one favor, you’d get a little chit chat with the boss-lady, face to face?” 

“First of all, that was more along the lines of five favors. And you know, this concept may surprise you, but Jenny and I are actually friends. We go way back. Does she even know you’re here, or is this a little pissing contest, mm?” 

“Ha, nice try. Tell me this. What’s someone like you even doing here? I saw what you did to Bashir. You’re way too serious to be taking side-jobs for Jenny.” 

“And why is that any of your concern?” 

“Maybe because I don’t trust you with her. I’d be shit at what I do if I wasn’t suspicious.” 

A pause. Miranda doesn’t fill it. 

“Or… maybe you’re right. Maybe I think you and I could help each other out. Jenny doesn’t have  _ friends _ .” 

Miranda’s voice gets quiet. “Is that right?” Cassie can barely pick it out. Whatever the rest of the words are, she loses them. She can hear icy, spine-tingly intensity in the hush, but not what’s causing it. 

The second voice she’s eavesdropping on belongs to a man. He sounds… kinda young. And if an otherwise non-descript French-Canadian accent could be described as sleazy, he sounds sleazy. Cassie’s not  _ super _ sure what she walked into, but it’s also… not that exciting? Honestly, this sounds like exactly what Miranda said. Just an average day in an average hotel room with some average criminal talking about... average crime things. Kinda disappointing. Sneaking onto the tarmac mid-MinuteJets flight was way more adrenaline-inducing than this. 

“So you’re giving me a chance to join your little coup?” 

Cassie flinches. Miranda’s voice just got  _ very _ clear and  _ very _ close. 

A heavy thud hits the door. Cassie jumps backwards, stifling a yelp with a hand clapped over her mouth. Faint scuffling sounds follow: louder, quieter, slower, then silent. Cassie’s heart pounds in her chest. Should she yell for help? Bang on the door? Run? 

“No thanks,” she hears, and it’s the only warning she gets before the door opens in her face. 

The first thing she sees is the shock in Miranda’s eyes. The second thing is the strange, black-handled wire dangling from her wrist, and the third thing is the body on the floor behind her. The very, very  _ still _ body.

“You can’t be here.” The wire vanishes into a coat-pocket. There’s color in her cheeks and a hair out of place against her very-red lips and this half-uncoiled intensity in every line of her body under that black coat, like a— a panther or something, something feral and scary and just done with a hunt. 

“Did you just—” 

“What the hell do you think you’re doing?” 

Okay, shock is gone; Miranda is  _ pissed. _

“Um.” 

“You have  _ no idea _ what you’ve walked into. None.” Miranda grabs her by the elbow and starts dragging her back down the hallway over her half-formed protests and stumbled explanations. 

Distantly, the elevator dings. 

Miranda freezes, eyes darting frantically around the space. They land on the janitorial closet. She reaches out and grabs the handle, swinging it open to stacks of spare white towels and a mop bucket, and when Miranda grabs her by the waist and starts pulling her around in front of her, clearly about to shove her inside, Cassie finally digs in her heels and says, “Um, no? Stop it?” which lands her in this weird half-dip backwards with only Miranda’s hand low on her back to support her and she’s caught between a shivery feeling along her spine as they make eye contact and the thought that she is  _ definitely  _ going to get dropped on her head if Miranda lets go which— 

—is right when an unfamiliar voice from somewhere behind the open door she can’t see through says, “Miranda, is that your foot in the maid’s closet?” 

It’s fascinating, actually. Watching the split-second decision race across Miranda’s face. This woman has expressions for  _ days _ , and the ones that go with ‘Do I want to explain why I’m shoving a woman in the spare towel room’ are really a sight to see. 

Miranda yanks her back up again with a death glare, then turns a mostly-composed smile down the hallway. 

There are three people standing there: Two tall, burly men whose dark suits just scream  _ bodyguard _ and one wiry woman between them. She might be southeast Asian, or possibly Latina, and she’s wearing an impeccable red pantsuit which, in that moment, Cassie’s brain just really helpfully wants to ask where to buy. 

Miranda brushes off her slacks, pushes that straying bit of hair back out of her eyes, and says, “Jenny. This is my… associate.” 

The promotion makes Cassie straighten up. “Alessandra,” she says, sticking out a hand. 

Jenny raises an eyebrow but doesn’t speak, and also doesn’t shake. 

“She’ll wait outside while we chat.” The look Miranda shoots her warns her not to argue with all the subtlety of a shoe to the face. “But there’s... something you need to know before you go in there.” 

A chill races down Cassie’s spine. For all thirty seconds of being manhandled down the hallway, she actually managed to forget. 

Body. 

Very,  _ very _ still body. 

Yeah there’s a word for that kind of body and it's “dead.”

Hearing Miranda explain, softly, that she has relieved Jenny of a  _ disloyal employee _ comes to her filtered through a slow-walking haze. She’s seeing double. One hotel hallway superimposed over another. One dead body, blond hair replaced by brown, about to turn over, smile up at her with a slit throat and say in Alex’s voice, “Told you you didn’t want to know.” 

“That’s… ahead of schedule.” Jenny toes the corpse over onto its back. Not Alex. Dead body, but not Alex. Don’t see Alex. “You did make him very nervous. But I also heard he had a little crush, did you catch on? That tends to make even reasonably smart help very, very stupid. A thank you’s in order, I suppose.” 

She’s got the  _ toe _ of her  _ shoe _ in his  _ open mouth _ — 

Then the door is closed again, and Cassie’s on the outside with nothing but two silent bodyguards and impending panic to keep her company. They flank the door, so she stands awkwardly across from it, sure her eyes are dinner-plate-sized. She tries to mimic their posture, half because she  _ really _ doesn’t belong here but maybe she can make it look like it, half just to make sure her joints don’t seize up so hard she cuts off her own blood flow. Chin up. Shoulders back and down. Spine so stiff she feels last night’s shitty, Buckley-fixated sleep in every individual vertebrae. 

“I wasn’t sold. Victor — no offense — never seemed worth the trouble, even if it is a convenient little outpost.” 

That door is  _ so _ thin. Does everyone in organized crime do business behind super thin doors? Well, sure, the Sokolovs did too. Guess not even murder money can buy some goddamn peace and quiet. 

“But this?” It’s Jenny’s voice, still. Her accent is indistinctly European, like maybe she was British before Quebec contaminated that with the local flavor. “This… is a problem, and I doubt it goes away without some more trouble. What’s the offer.”

“There’s someone who owes me. She’d be your contact, and I don’t mind being the intro, but she can’t know I’m here. She’s… not loyal to Victor, exactly. Problem is, she did try to kill me, so this could go one of two ways: very good, or very bad.” 

Jenny has a sharp, distinctive laugh. “My favorite.” 

Not Cassie’s favorite. The whole, people trying to kill people thing. A bit too much of a  _ thing _ around her these days. Is it hot in here? The last hour is creeping up on her like one of any number of creepy things, all of which remind her too much of people who kill people so she really, really doesn’t want to think about creeping and in the meantime Jenny and Miranda’s voices are drifting farther back into the room anyway, so maybe she can afford to give up on the whole snooping thing for ten minutes and get some  _ very very very need-to-breathe  _ air if… is that… the elevator again? 

The  _ bing _ down the hallway was tinny and possibly a figment of her imagination, but after a few more seconds of hyperventilating in silence, a woman’s voice somewhere far around the corner calls, “Housekeeping!’ 

Housekeeping, Cassie thinks with relief, and peels herself off the wall, walking dazedly back down the row of doors, around the corner, past the elevator bay and one more turn because where there goes housekeeping, there goes the restock, and the lady she can now see with a cleaning cart turning down the third corner of the hallway probably has… 

“Hi there,” she tries. Does she sound like a crazy person? Hard to tell. 

The woman looks up and Cassie freezes, because for five seconds, she has the  _ exact face _ of the woman who knocked on Alex’s suite door the morning after— 

But, no, this is a different woman. Younger. Looking at her expectantly over the handles of her cart. “Can I help you, miss?” 

“Yes.  _ Yes. _ Hi. I have a super annoying request. Do you have some of the little—” She mimes a shot with her hand, which, in retrospect, is weird and definitely unnecessary. “—vodkas for the minifridge?” 

Does she need an excuse, or does an excuse just make it weirder? 

“We ran out and my ice is melting.” 

Definitely weirder. 

Distantly, she hears the elevator bing  _ again _ . For a totally empty floor, sixteen sure is getting a lot of visitors all of a sudden. 

“I can pay,” she adds, tugging her wallet out of her bag and pulling free a twenty. 

The woman is definitely giving her a weird look, but she’s not saying no, just bending and popping open the green plastic tub on the bottom level of the cart. “How many you need?” 

Part of her genuinely wishes “as many as I can stuff in my purse” was an acceptable answer to this kind of thing. 

“Three?” 

“Here you are.” 

_ “ _ Thank you  _ so _ much,” she says with the closest thing she can make her face muscles cooperate with to a winning smile. 

There’s a strange sound somewhere on the floor with them. Cassie’s eyebrows pull together as she’s tucking two bottles in her purse. The housekeeper is making a face. A nervous, eyes-darting-left-and-right-and-back-to-the-room-door-again face. “Is that all for you?” she asks, voice much, much higher. 

More sounds. Dull. Heavy. Something that might have been a grunt. 

“Uhhhuh,” Cassie says slowly, staring back down the hallway. She hears the door click, and when she turns back, realizes the housekeeper has vanished into room 1601. Cassie is alone, in the hallway, and there are  _ concerning noises _ coming from back in the direction she just came from and— 

The smart thing to do would be anything that isn’t walking towards the noises, right? There’s an emergency exit right there beside her with a little glowing stairs icon and even if she walks away from that, which, for inexplicable reasons, she does, she’s about to pass the empty elevator bay and she could push that down button  _ right now _ but, no, she’s turned the other corner and— 

The guards are gone. 

No, wait, not gone, those are boots, guard boots, sliding limply against the carpet as they are dragged, with another grunt of effort, by an invisible force, into the janitorial closet. 

Okay, Cassie can put together invisible force and grunting and dragging and add up to  _ human being _ . Someone. Someone has done  _ something _ to Jenny’s bodyguards and the logic of the last hour tells her that that something is probably murder and any second now the last bit of heel is going to disappear into that closet and that someone is going to step out and she’s just going to be standing here, frozen, with a tiny vodka bottle in her hand that she hasn’t even gotten to take a single sip of since she saw the  _ last dead body  _ and— 

Well, she can stand here and get dead, or she can run away and hide, or she can really just max out her perfect streak of idiocy today because, I mean, fuck dying, fuck hiding, fuck wherever Alex has gone because he’s not here telling her not to do this and Miranda is behind that last door down there and there’s nothing else between whatever killed those men and her unless she. 

Moves. 

Forward. 

Small steps, first. Then faster ones, on tip-toes, and pressing against the opposite wall as hard as she can the closer she gets to the closet, and  _ holding her breath _ because holy shit this is  _ not real definitely not real but absolutely definitely happening  _ and schooching by— 

Oh god, oh god, oh god. There are five men in that one tiny closet, and only two of them are the guards, but the guards are  _ definitely _ dead and  _ definitely _ having their guns stolen out of some strappy black holster situations by the alive ones which is the only reason she’s not making immediate, death-inducing eye-contact with them right now cause clearly they’re  _ a little busy _ getting ready to  _ definitely kill her _ and— 

Then she’s past, and the sinch of panic holding her lungs closed gives way in a burst of air that has her  _ running _ down the rest of the hallway as fast as she can, banging on the door to 1623 with her fist as hard as she can and saying “HoUSekEEPING?” in a completely panicked voice because, fuck if she knows, instinct? Maybe it will buy her more time? 

Miranda opens the door in her face, and Cassie has a half second urge to just throw herself at her and start sobbing hysterically, but no, nope, no time for that. She flings herself through and slams it behind her, hard. “There are guys — In the hallway — And your guys? They’re dead. Super dead. Very dead. Bleeding in a— a mop bucket dead.” 

“Cassie. Cassie, slow down.” Miranda has a hand on her arm. When did she put it there? Unclear.

“Don’t really think this is a slow down kinda moment.” she forces out, gesturing behind her with a hand that is… still holding a tiny vodka. “Big guys. Big scary guys. Definitely here to kill at  _ least one of you _ type guys.” 

“That’s even more ahead of schedule.” 

Jenny’s casual tone forces Cassie to take in the room beyond Miranda through a shiny haze of adrenaline and disbelief. It’s a very nice room. Jenny’s sitting on the back of a desk chair, one foot on an arm, the other in the seat, elbows on thighs, hands clasped, looking entirely too calm as she skewers Cassie with a very nice pair of long-lashed, deep brown eyes. Miranda’s also staring at her from much more close at hand, squeezed as they both are into the tiny hallway between bathroom and closet. 

And she can hear footsteps; heavy, scary footsteps, definitely headed right the fuck their way. 

“So you decided  _ now _ was a good time to finally have our meet-up?” Miranda says, still staring at Cassie even though the words are clearly directed Jenny’s way. “What, d’you wait till you knew you were a few days out from a fucking mutiny?” 

“What better time.” 

“How about  _ any?”  _

“Um, whatever this is, can it wait?” Cassie cuts in, shoving the bottle in her bag so she can wave her hands at the door with a little more  _ oomph _ . “They’re  _ coming. Here. Now.” _

They’re both staring at her, but that doesn’t really tell her anything about where their attention is, because they were both staring at her through the whole exchange they just had too. 

“How many?” Miranda asks, and the sarcastic rage from only seconds ago is gone. She’s all business. 

“Three. Three men. Big men. I said that already. With guns. Did I mention the guns?” 

“Shit,” Miranda offers helpfully. “Have you got any helpful shortcuts out of your deluxe suites?” 

“Don’t take that tone with me. This is an entirely respectable establishment, Miranda. I don’t build secret passageways into my hotel chains.” 

“There’s no way out?” Cassie’s voice is very, very high. 

Miranda doesn’t let up. “Tell me you at least have a gun on you.” 

“Wish I did,” Jenny answers, and for the first time, Cassie hears the tremble running under the cool, composed voice. “I’m a businesswoman. That’s why I have bodyguards.” 

“Next time, hire better  _ fucking  _ bodyguards.” 

Great. Miranda’s pissed, and Jenny’s scared, and neither of them seem to have any bright ideas about getting out of here, and something  _ very loud _ is banging against the door. No _hi, hello, I'm here to kill you, open up please?_ No niceties, not even a threat; just  _ banging _ , like something more solid than a shoulder trying to bash straight through. 

“I do have them built well, at least,” Jenny deadpans. 

Is that it? Did she just sneak past three men with guns and two dead bodies just so these two can snark at each other and stare at her? How can they both just be  _ standing _ (and sitting) there? 

Yeah, okay, no, that is enough of  _ that _ , thank you. 

Cassie starts ignoring them and staring frantically around the room instead, mentally adding up abstract art and wall-bolted lamps and a very dainty wire trash bin. King-sized bed. Gold-embroidered curtains. Little placard with the fire safety plan and some pinned-up phone numbers. She could call— No, no. No one, not even the front desk, could get up here in time. 

It’s a nice room, but it’s not that big. The list just repeats. Bin. Bed. Curtains. Window. Too bad this isn’t some Von Trapp family musical number where she can sew all the curtains together real fast and they can climb down the side of the building and dance around in a rainy gazebo. That… doesn’t quite sound right. That can’t be what the curtain sewing was for in that movie, was it? 

Wait. 

Wait wait wait. 

Curtains.

Window. 

Rain. 

Liam’s windshield wipers flash in front of her eyes. 

Cassie shoves past Miranda, around Jenny’s precarious sprawl of a seating choice, and flings wide the curtains. She looks straight down and— vertigo, bad —nope, just a straight shot down to pavement but— There.  _ There it is _ , that damn window washing platform, just a little too far to the right but  _ not that far down _ and, now that the sun is starting to set, empty. She glares at it, like maybe with enough tension between her eyelids she can yank it twenty feet closer. Instead, its metal railing catches the light, half blinding her. That thing is definitely taunting her.

Okay. Okay. 

Cassie turns around and rushes back to the bathroom, hoping against all hope that this is the kind of hotel room she thinks it is. Miranda said deluxe suite, and this, on its own, barely qualifies as a suite-suite. She’s seen enough hotel room layouts that she’s giving herself pretty good odds. 

Inside the little white room, she freezes, realizing the day’s  _ first _ dead body is now chilling in the bathtub in here, and that’s cool, that’s normal, that’s fine… but as soon as she tears her eyes away from his weirdly slack cheeks, there it is. “ Yes! This is it!” 

Jenny’s voice drifts through the doorway. "What is she doing?” 

“I don’t question it,” Miranda answers, impassive. 

“Miranda,” she pops her head back out into the hallway. “I need you to break down a door.” 

When she registers what Cassie just said, her lips twitch. “Thought you’d never ask.” 

She joins her in the bathroom, pressing close to Cassie’s side in front of the locked door between the sink and the dead-body-bath. She eyes it, then flips out her knife instead, sliding it into the seam just above the handle. 

It swings open. 

“Wait,” Cassie says. “Why didn’t you do  _ that _ the night we got here.”

“Different kind of door. Now, was there another part to this plan or are we just going into the adjoining suite for a change of scenery.” 

“Right, no. Right.” Cassie’s up and only slightly tripping over her scarf as she invades the unlit mirror-room, flinging back the curtains. “Okay. C’mon. Come  _ on _ .” She starts cranking the window. “There’s a… a thingy. It’s like two floors down but… I mean… You probably do things like this all the time, right?” 

Before she can second guess herself, she sticks one leg out the window, winces as her ass gets a little stuck, turns the crank one more time behind her, breathes in and out three times, fast, and drops. 

The cage sways horribly as she lands with an unflattering thud and stumbles forward into the safety railing. “Oh my god. Oh my god.” She backs away from the edge, breathing hard, then looks up. “Okay! Come on!” 

Miranda’s face is staring down at her in absolute shock. “You have got to be fucking kidding me.” 

“Do you want to die up there?” Cassie sounds even more manic than she feels. 

“Maybe more than I want to die down there.” 

“Your associate thinks you do this all the time.” Jenny’s voice is distant, but clear. 

“Oh, shut up,” Miranda says, then shakes her head, purses her lips, shimmies around the window frame (a lot more gracefully than her own attempt), and drops. 

Cassie should have been out of the way, but the platform is still swinging from her drop, and in the end it’s good she’s a little too close because Miranda lands off-balance and right near the bit of the rail where there’s only one bar that slides up and down to let people in, and her heels slide and Cassie has five seconds of absolute terror as she watches one go right off under the bar, then she’s grabbing Miranda full around the waist and hauling her to the opposite side, clutching at her, holding her way too tight and... they’re fine? They’re fine. They’re both fine, holy shit, holy fucking, shit. 

“Oh good,” she squeaks, not letting go. “You’re alive.” 

Then Jenny says “Incoming!” and they’re stumbling apart to steady her as she lands. 

For several seconds, it’s a lot of everyone whispering “Oh my god,” and staring at each other. After they get that out of their systems, the only thing between them and safety is the interesting experience of three women in two moderately bulky jackets and one not-warm-enough pantsuit on one tiny window washing platform, all trying to figure out where the button is that makes the damn thing go up and down. 


	10. Chapter 10

It’s been a quiet car ride since they got out of the hotel. Since they figured out the platform. Since they made it up to the windy, freezing rooftop with its tarp-covered swimming pool. Since they trekked down a million stairs in a silent rear emergency stairwell together, Jenny ten steps ahead, Miranda quietly hanging back and explaining through gritted teeth that, no, they would not call the cops, no, they would not be telling anyone downstairs what happened and, yes, the best thing they could do would be to get out and leave it to Jenny’s people to deal with the mess they’d left behind them. Since Jenny vanished into a sleek white luxury sedan while Miranda steered her to the hatchback with her elbow back in that death-grip that means she’s in big trouble. 

The quiet is probably easier than the alternative, but, as a general rule, Cassie is over silently dreading whatever’s next. 

“You said you were taking ‘odd jobs.’” 

Miranda’s jaw visibly tightens. “Yes, and?” 

“And I heard you say Victor. Twice. What are you up to?” 

Miranda’s eyes slide over to her, then back to the road. “Why is it you think I’m always up to something?”

“Oh, cut the crap. I heard you. And I helped. Now you _have_ to tell me.” 

“I have to, do I?” 

Cassie turns fully sideways in her seat, leaning her elbows on the stick and trying something she usually only pulls out in bars. “Please?” 

Ten seconds pass in silence, then Miranda sighs. Her eyes keep flicking over, so Cassie keeps on the pout and the puppy eyes. Another ten. “Fine! Fine. If you must know, I haven’t exactly left things be any more than you did. But I can’t drag you into this, Cassie. It’s not about Alex anymore. Or Felix. It’s… personal.” 

Cassie chews on that for a minute, then leans back in her seat. “Okay.” 

Miranda hits the brakes hard enough Cassie oofs into her seatbelt.

“What the—” 

It’s Miranda’s turn to turn full sideways and stare at her. “ _Okay?_ After all that, after following me halfway across the city because I went out to blow my nose without telling you, _now_ you’re all ‘ _Ohh-kay’?”_

Cassie just stares at her for a second, still a little heart-stopped from the sudden end of the forward momentum, then she lets out a nervous laugh. “Uh, yeah. I can respect personal. I drag other people into _my_ bullshit. Doesn’t mean I force myself into everyone else’s.” 

A car honks behind them. They’re still not moving, and they are not at a light. 

“Uh, Miranda… are you gonna…” 

“For fucks sake, Cassie, you could have died today.” Miranda’s hand grabs her arm without warning, squeezing hard. “Do you not understand that?” 

“Um. I’m fine,” she says. “Are you?” 

Miranda glances down at her hand, then at the road in front of them, then the car who just did a full reverse and lane switch to get around her, then back to her hand. She doesn’t let go, but her grip gentles, and she slowly strokes down to her wrist. “Sorry,” she says, voice rough, low. “I just…” She pats the back of Cassie's hand, lingers, then pulls away at last. “I need you to…” She sets both hands on the steering wheel, wrapping her fingers deliberately around the leather casing. “...to let me handle this. Some of this. Some of this is my mess. Some of it can be both of our messes, alright? And I will… do my very best—” 

Another car honks behind them and Miranda startles, then slams her hands down on the steering wheel. “Jesus _fucking_ Christ, will you just _go round_.” 

Cassie, who usually finds other people’s anger embarrassing at best, scary at worst, finds that, for some reason, she can’t look away, and she’s also… smiling? 

“I will do…” She pauses, brushing her hair out of her eyes before meeting Cassie’s again. “...my very best not to keep you in the dark to keep you safe. Alright?” 

Cassie nods. “Alright. Yeah. That sounds good. Thank you.” 

Miranda breathes out through her nose in a huff, as though she hasn’t emptied her lungs for the entire drive. Cassie waits. Waits some more. 

“Are… are we gonna…” 

“Yes, yes, fuck it.” 

Miranda finally steps on the gas again. 

* * *

Okay, so _I’m fine_ might have been an overstatement. 

Cassie should have realized she was coasting along sky high on adrenaline, but she didn’t, and it’s not till they drive past her bar that it crashes in on her, hard. Her breathing stays even, which is almost scarier than if she were full on hyperventilating freaking out here, but instead she’s just silently, invisibly, frozenly… reliving it. Not the heart-in-throat drop out the window, not the running through the hotel, not the total stranger’s dead body staring at her from a bathtub. Well, a little bit all of that, but mostly that moment after the cleaning woman left her alone at the _safe_ end of the hallway, and she— did it again. Forced her locked knees to move. Stared dead-on at the scary men in the closet. Ran headlong towards what she _knew_ would be a disaster. Then banging on that hotel door, hoping Miranda would give enough of a flying fuck to open up and let her in. 

They pull up into their street spot. She flinches when Miranda’s door slams shut. She doesn’t really feel herself climb out of the car, walk to the stoop, smoothly unpocket her keys and open up, but then she’s inside, and inside feels too small and too weird and simultaneously too unlike her to be homey and too homey to be hers and the walls are breathing more than she is, which means she _definitely_ needs air so she walks straight across the house in a daze. Front door — hall — kitchen — patio door — patio. 

It’s only when she’s standing out in the cold again that she knows what she’s doing. 

She drops her purse on the ground. Takes off her shoes. Gloves. Pants. Scarf. Coat. Shirt. 

Behind her, as she’s unclasping her bra, the door opens again. 

“What are you doing? It’s seven degrees out.” 

She shimmies out of her underwear. The cold of the flagstone is the only thing that really penetrates as she fast-walks over to the far corner of the patio. Brushing off a layer of clumpy ice, she flips up the padded lid. A jittery little pocket of her brain wonders what she’d have done if this thing were empty, or not turned on, or actually had been a grill set all along — she’s never been out here before. But the air steams immediately above the surface of the water, and she climbs in. 

“Ah. I’ll… leave you to it.” Miranda’s voice is rough, her accent stronger than Cassie usually hears, or maybe it's just that she hasn’t really been hearing anything for the last ten minutes or so. 

“You can come in,” she offers. 

“That would be the definition of a bad idea.” 

It’s not an answer that makes a lot of sense to her right now, so she shrugs and sinks her head down under the surface. Her toes are doing that itchy-prickly thing in the sudden heat of the hot tub after the icy air, and her nose is almost as bad, but she stays under long enough that the feeling goes away. She opens her eyes a little bit. She was never very good at that, but she can get a fuzzy kind of filtered glow from the little blue LEDs ringing the edge of the hot tub, just under the water. Her lungs want her to go up, but it's peaceful here. Weightless. 

She’s thinking about him, then. Not the him she’s got locked up in her head, but him that night, in the infinity pool, talking about… dating, if she just looks at it on the surface, but she’s underwater, now. He was talking about dating. But he made _her_ talk about loneliness. 

She jerks back up into the freezing air with a gasp, then the air comes right back out of her lungs in a horrible choking sound. She’s not crying, she’s just— it’s like her lungs are trying to throw up air. “Fuck!” 

It’s only when she hears Miranda let out an angry-sounding sigh behind her that she realizes she didn’t actually leave yet. Footsteps cross the patio and pause somewhere over her shoulder. A glove catches hold of her wet cheek, a shock of cold, turning her to face pale, unreadable eyes. The tips drag against her. If not for the leather between Miranda’s hand and her skin, her nails would have raked down her cheek. “You weren’t supposed to see that.” 

A sound that only someone trying very, very hard to be polite would have called a laugh slips out of Cassie’s mouth. “What, a bunch of dead people?” 

The fingers slide down beneath her chin, then fall away, clenching in tight to her palm. “That, yes. Especially that. But the rest. Any of it.” Her next sigh is less angry, more strained. She sits, fully clothed, on the side of the tub near Cassie’s head. “I don’t want you to be _fine_ after days like this. They happen. They’re shit.” 

“Yeah.” Cassie sinks her chin back down. Any part of her not being actively boiled is very, very cold. “That’s starting to sink in.” She doesn’t say the rest. That it only _kind of_ feels like shit, and it might be the part of her that just wants to reach back half an hour and get that shot of adrenaline racing under her skin again that feels it. It should _all_ be shitty, right? 

“If it makes you feel any better, at least all that, back there, had nothing to do with either of us. Jenny’s got a mess on her hands I did _not_ expect to get caught up in.” 

“Mmhmm,” Cassie agrees, everything but her eyes underwater, so it's mostly bubbles. She comes back up to chin-level. “I got like, hmmm...fifteen percent of that. What you two were talking about. Whoever she is, whatever she does, some people she works with are coming after her for it.” 

“It is a very bad idea to eavesdrop on these people’s business.” Miranda’s tone is serious, but Cassie thinks she can hear a _tiny_ undercurrent of… pride? She’s not quite meeting Cassie’s eyes, staring over her head and out into the darkness beyond their lattice fence. 

“Then next time you should meet somewhere with better doors.” 

“Yep.” Miranda nods. “You’ve got that right.” 

Cassie looks away. It’s weird talking to someone who isn’t looking at her, even if she probably made this into a weirder conversation than it needed to be by deciding to have it out here. She looks for the button that turns on the jets, then crouch-walks over to it. The high setting is startlingly loud, but with another click, it’s down to a manageable cacophony of bubbles. Part of her can feel that her inner body temp is already high enough that her heart beating in her temples feels like it could melt her brain like cheese, but the rest of her still feels _cold_. 

_So, you’re in shock_. She hears it in Annie’s voice in her head, and it makes her smile a little. That fades fast. Miranda is still sitting with her, which is… nice, considering how disgustingly cold out it is, and considering that Cassie followed her across the city today, and considering Cassie got home, got naked, and got in the hot tub after that. Behind Miranda sits her purse and her little pile of clothes. Inside it, Cassie knows, are three hotel vodkas. She forgot about them in the car, or she definitely would have drank one. Two. Probably three. Now, looking at the bag just makes her feel gross. Part of her wants to climb (naked) out of the hot tub and _cold cold cold_ hop-step her way over and grab them, but there’s another part of her that just wishes she’d left it inside where she couldn’t _see_ , because the thought of being drunk right now? On top of this jumbled mess of adrenaline crash and deja vu and brain-melty steam? She doesn’t want to go there. 

But she… wants to talk about it. Maybe. Maybe bordering on yeah. “You know, the only reason I’m alive is because I went looking for a drink.” 

“I’m pretty sure you’re alive because you had a crazy idea, went ahead and gave it a go, and it worked.” 

Cassie scooches closer again. “Before _that_. I left you guys to try and get a stupid drink, and that’s the only thing that kept me from winding up just like those bodyguards.” 

“There are worse reasons, definitely.” 

“Right.” She pauses. “I mean, I couldn’t exactly have done anything else? And if I stayed with them, I’d be just another dead body? In a mop bucket? But I— I don’t _want_ that to be why? I can’t _always_ make it out of shitty situations just because…” It’s all hotel hallways that all look the same, but also frat house kitchens with the whole table covered in white and blue and amber bottles flashing in the lights from the living-room-turned-dance-floor; it’s cozy little benches and elevator dings, but also staggering down sidewalks and crashing hard on the train and not waking up till morning; it’s knowing Felix must have walked right by her, unconscious, on his way to kill Alex, and— 

“Always?” 

The word is pointed, but, in this moment, Cassie doesn’t feel judged. She feels… invited, and that’s dangerous, because she’s totally sober but might spill her guts anyway. 

“Look. The night Alex died, I wandered out into the hallway because, I dunno, he was making weird little noises that kept waking me up. Point is, I was completely black-out drunk. And it’s like… just when I think I’ve gotten over just how fucked up it was that I got back in bed with a dead body after that? Some stupid hotel brings it all back up again and I know, I _know_ that says something terrible about me as a person but it’s… it’s not even the worst thing? Like— Yeah, I’m not _mean_ when I’m drunk. I don’t hurt anyone. But s-sometimes I leave a party early and pass out on the subway and find out later that the guy who was flirting with me ended up sleeping with my roommate instead and taking a video of her and posting it online when she wouldn’t text back and making her lose her job and I just think about how— if I had just— stayed? Not even like, to have sex him? Just to make sure she got home too but I— I’m never the responsible friend, you know? No one expects that from me. I’m not the smart friend or the mom friend, I’m the fun friend, and s-sometimes it’s like the universe is telling me that the only t-thing keeping me out of trouble is exactly the thing that gets me in trouble in the first place and cool, great, good for me but if that keeps getting everyone else around me hurt, it’s n-not—” The need to suck in a breath forces Cassie to shut up. 

Miranda watches her, silently, expressionlessly, through all of it, whatever the fuck _that_ was, which has now turned into watching her hyperventilate in a hot tub, which suddenly makes Cassie’s cheeks go extra red with embarrassment on top of the whole hot-water-freezing-air situation. She squeezes her eyes shut. “Nevermind. This is stupid. I’m fine.”

Miranda gives her three slower breaths in and out before she says, ”You know, I’ve stopped a few times myself.” 

“Stopped what?” Cassie’s voice is a little harsher than she expected. 

“Drinking.” 

“Oh.” She’s not totally sure that’s what she was talking about by the end there, but she lets Miranda keep going. 

“It’s… not safe, most of the time. With the people I’m around. I do things, say things I can’t really get away with. I mean, hell, that’s what got Alex killed, if I really wanted to dwell on it. I don’t. I shouldn’t. Except sometimes, I do, and drinking’s the same way. Sure, I shouldn’t, but eventually I decided, for me, it’s okay. It’s careless, but it’s also the only time I’m not… There are things I’m not good with. Honesty. Sincerity. Talking before doing, blah blah.” She rolls her eyes, like even the idea of these things insults her. “Point is, a drink or two, now and then, can help. Not that I’m saying—” She lets out a little air, like she’s frustrated with the words she’s picking, but doesn’t have the patience to pick better ones. “What’s right for me isn’t what’s right for you. No one but you can decide where your limit is. Today, you’re allowed to be alive because you saw me kill a man and needed a fucking drink.” 

Slowly, as Miranda speaks, Cassie feels the ball of tension she’d wound herself up into coming undone. It’s weirdly sweet, when Miranda tries this hard to be sympathetic. “Thank you,” she says quietly, and bends her head down and presses a kiss to Miranda’s knee, the fabric of her slacks smooth and cold against her lips. “I think I needed to hear that.” 

Miranda’s looking down at her now, and there’s something in that stare that spooks her a little. She shivers and sinks lower, turning back around with a splash that sends the edge of a brighter reflection rippling in the water. When she looks up, she spots the moon up above them, full and bright. Her head tips further back until it hits something solid. As soon as she realizes it’s Miranda’s leg, she moves to pull away. “Shit, sorry.” Her sopping wet mess of bun-head is lying right on her pants. “You’re gonna freeze if I get you wet.” 

Miranda catches her by the chin. 

“Get back here,” she all but growls. Her hand applies the faintest pressure, the last two fingers a gentle threat against her neck. Cassie feels a tiny little sound escape her throat and quickly caves, resting her soaking hair on Miranda’s thigh. 

“Good girl,” Miranda murmurs, and tugs the scrunchy free, running her fingers through her hair. “Damage is already done; this’ll be much better.” 

Through the steam, under the scalding water, Cassie shivers head to toe. It feels really, really nice, lying here like this. Like they’ve said enough words that the worst of the day is buried under them, and they made it through something together, something wilder and faster and scarier than just… running away to Montreal. It’s basically the kind of thing she’d do with Annie after a messy breakup, just find some wine and hot water and help whoever’s heart got broken (hers, almost always) feel pampered, but somehow right now it’s almost… too nice? Like, between the heat of the water and the solid warmth of Miranda’s thigh through the cloth and the tingly sensation of having her hair toyed with, she might just melt away into the pool and never come out again. Slowly, as her racing thoughts settle, she’s becoming more aware of herself again. Like the fact that she is _entirely_ naked and even though the jets make that pretty invisible, she’s suddenly, uncomfortably aware of her own breasts just below the surface, the pass of swirling water across her nipples, which are definitely hard, which is... weird?

She clears her throat against nothing, then tries to remember what she meant to say, way back when she first brought up her vodka mission, before she derailed herself with a little trip down pity-memory lane. “I…” God, her throat is dry. 

“Hm?” 

One of Miranda’s fingers passes behind her ear, and her vision goes a little spotty. It’s definitely time to get out of the heat, but she can’t seem to make herself so much lift her head. 

“It’s not gonna go great if I try and pull off serious again right now but like, pretend I could— What I’d want to do is lie here and glare at you and tell you if you don’t want me to follow you around, you have to take me with you, but I think I— I’m starting to get it, just a little bit? And I hate it, and I don’t want to die, but I also don’t want _you_ to die, and—” 

“—I probably would have lived,” Miranda says, calm as can be. 

“Excuse me?” She turns her head so she can see her, feeling the wet patch from her hair against her cheek. 

“If you hadn’t come running down that hall like the crazy person you are—” Why, in this moment, with that little smile on Miranda’s lips, does _crazy person_ sound like a term of endearment? “—we'd have had one hell of a fight on our hands, and I might not have kept Jenny alive too, but I’ve fought three men and lived before. Have to keep ‘em choked in at the doorway so they can’t all come in at once. Get a gun, fast, if you can, and if not, just get the upper hand on one. That’s the trick. Don’t let it _be_ three on one. Any one is fine. Use him as a human meat shield if you have to, but don’t get stuck lugging around a body too long. We’re faster than the kind of burly man they send to take out other burly men. Smaller. Use that. Go for weak spots.” 

Miranda pauses, pushing a bit of Cassie’s wet bangs back behind her ear. 

“I can show you, if that’s what you really want.” 

Cassie stares up at her through the steam. “Wait, seriously?” 

“Look, Cassie. I want you to say you learned your lesson, and next time you’re between me and some goons with guns, you’ll run the other way and let me handle it. But you’re not going to do that, are you?” A strange, small smile flicks across her face. “You tailed me like the fucking FBI and I didn’t even notice. Why do I have a feeling that every time from here on I tell you to _please_ just stay put, what I’m actually doing is inviting you to pull something even more ridiculous than you did today? If I don’t want to see you dead, I might have to shut up and take you with me.” 

“Holy shit.” Cassie sits up. 

“But _only_ if you have some idea how to get yourself out of a scrape without diving out a window.” 

“Holy shit. Are you gonna teach me how to _fight_ someone?” 

“Is that what you want?” 

“Um, yes. Miranda if I hadn’t just remembered like twenty seconds ago that I took all my clothes off out there I would be hugging you right now.” 

“Aaaalright,” she answers, half laughter, and stands up. “Yep, that’s definitely my cue to go inside so you can get out of there before you’ve boiled away whatever common sense you had left. Do you want me to get you a towel first, or are you just going to make a mad naked dash upstairs.” 

Cassie considers. Drunk-Cassie would give a different answer, but, “A towel would be amazing.”

**Author's Note:**

> You cannot give me a character whose formative backstory is all about her thing for running full-tilt towards disaster, then expect me not to ship this. And listen. As much as I appreciate a good reader insert if no one else is going to do this for me I am absolutely going to have to do it for myself.


End file.
